to hear that she had never set eyes upon the
sea until to-day. Mademoiselle, for such an ingenue, was very
courageous, he thought, and looked at Mary closely; but her eyes
wandered from him to the phantom-shapes that loomed out of a pale,
wintry mist: tramps thrashing their way to the North Sea: a vast,
distant liner with tiers of decks one above the other: a darting
torpedo-destroyer which flashed by like a streak of foam.

Everything was so interesting that Mary would far rather not have had to
talk, but she had been brought up in a school of old-fashioned courtesy.
To her, a failure in politeness would have been almost a crime: and as
the sisters had never imagined the possibility of her talking with a
strange young man, they had not cautioned her against doing so.

She had meant to scribble a few notes of her impressions during the
journey, for the benefit of Reverend Mother and the nuns, posting her
letter in Paris; but as the Frenchman appeared surprised at her
travelling alone, and everybody else seemed to be with friends, she
decided not to write until Florence. There, when she could say that she
had reached her journey's end safely, she might confess that she had
left London without her relatives or even the companion-maid they
advised.

"If Reverend Mother saw Aunt Sara, even for five minutes," Mary said to
herself, "she couldn't blame me."

As it happened, there had been such a rush at the last, after the great
decision was made, that Mary had not written to the convent. She had
only telegraphed: "Leaving at once for Florence. Will write."

She was hoping that Reverend Mother would not scold her for what she had
done, when suddenly another cliff, white as the cliffs of Dover,
glimmered through the haze. Then she forgot her sackcloth, for,
according to the Frenchman, this was old Grisnez, pushing its inquiring
nose into the sea; and beyond loomed the tall lighthouse of Calais.

It was absurdly wonderful on landing at Calais to hear every one talking
French. Of course, Mary had known that it would be so, but actually to
hear it, and to think that these people had spoken French since they
were babies, was ridiculously nice. She felt rewarded for all the pains
she had taken to learn verbs and acquire exactly the right accent; and
she half smiled in a friendly way at the dark porters in their blue
blouses, and at the toylike policemen with their swords and capes. Her
porter was a cross-looking, elderly man,