tones.

Two douaniers, one French, the other Italian, lounging on opposite sides
of the little stream flowing down from the Gorge of St. Louis, told that
this was the frontier. It was not the road to Italy that Mary knew, when
once or twice she had motored over the high bridge flung across the dark
Gorge of St. Louis on excursions to Bordighera and San Remo.
Nevertheless they were in Italy, and a mysterious change had come over
the landscape, the indefinable change that belongs to frontiers. The
buildings were shabbier; yet, as if in generous pity for their poorness,
roses and pink geraniums draped them in cataracts of bloom. Gardens were
less well kept, yet somehow more poetic. The colour of the old plastered
walls and pergolas was more beautiful here, because more faded, stained
green with moss, and splashed with many flower-like tints born of age
and weather.

Always ahead, as Mary walked on with Hannaford, the high red wall of the
Rochers Rouges glowed as if stained with blood where the sun struck it;
and between the towering heights of rock and the turquoise sea he
stopped her at an open-air restaurant roofed with palm leaves. There
Hannaford ordered luncheon, at a table almost overhanging the water, and
while the _bouillabaisse_ was being made, he took her to the cave of the
prehistoric skeletons.

Mary was interested, yet depressed. Life seemed such a little thing when
she thought of all the lives that had passed in one unending procession
of brief joys and tedious tragedies since those bones had been clothed
with flesh and had caged hearts which beat as hotly as hers was beating
now. "What does it matter," she said, "whether we are happy or not?"

"Does it not matter to ourselves?" Hannaford answered, rather than
asked.

"Just at this moment, I'm not sure."

"Does it matter more about making others happy?"

"Perhaps. I should like to think that in my life I had made some others
happy."

"I'm going to tell you by and by," he said, "how you can make one other
very happy. It's just a suggestion I have to offer. There may be nothing
in it."

He spoke rather dryly and perfunctorily, as he helped her down the
stairs of the cave-dwellers' rock-house. Mary had a vague idea that he
meant to interest her in a "sad case," as he had done once or twice
before, when he thought she needed to be "taken out of herself." She
expected to hear a tale of some poor girl who had "lost all," and must
be redeemed from disast