shaking her skirts apprehensively, with an
affectation of horror.

"How I do hate jumping things! And, anyhow, I suppose we ought to be
getting back to our hotel, or we shall be late for dinner. You don't
know what Hugh can be like when one is late for dinner. He is
capable of beginning without me."

Rainham had risen with a ready response to her words, bordering
almost on the ludicrous; and half an hour later he was congratulating
himself that at least six seats intervened between his place and
that of Mrs. Dollond at the dinner-table.

And yet on the morrow he found himself, and not without a certain
relief, sitting beside the mundane, little lady, and turning to her
incessant ripple of speech something of the philosophic indifference
to which her husband had attained, while a sturdy pair of
gaily-caparisoned horses, whose bells made a constant accompaniment,
not unpleasing in its preciseness, to the vagueness of Rainham's
thought, hurried them over the dusty surface of the Cornice.

Certainly the excursion into which he had been inveigled, rather
from indolence than from any freak of his inclination, afforded him,
now that it was undertaken, a certain desultory pleasure to which he
had long been a stranger. Into the little shrug, comic and
valedictory, of Mrs. Dollond's shoulders, as they passed the _Octroi_,
a gesture discreetly mocking of the conditions they had left, he
could enter with some humour, the appreciation of a resident who
still permitted himself at times the licence of a casual visitor on
his domain.

"Tell me," Mrs. Dollond had asked, as they rattled out of the
further gate of Ventimiglia, "why did the excellent lady who tried
to monopolize conversation in the _salon_ last night appear so
scandalized when I told her where we were going? Was I--surely now,
Mr. Rainham, I was not indiscreet?"

"Ah, Mrs. Dollond," said Rainham humorously, "you know it was a
delicate subject. At our hotel we don't recognise Monte Carlo. We
are divided upon the other topics in which we are interested: the
intrigues of the lawn tennis club, and the orthodoxy of the English
chaplain. But we are all orthodox about Monte Carlo, and Mrs. Engel
is the pillar of our faith. We think it's----"

"The devil?" interrupted Mr. Dollond, bending forward a little, with
his bland smile.

"Precisely," said Rainham; "that is what Mrs. Engel would say. Oh
no, Mrs. Dollond, we don't drive over to Monte Carlo from
Bordighera. At Me