her also. Claire
felt her need of instruction.

She looked down the steep zigzags of the path over the cliff to the
towers of the Castle of Collioure. She saw no Professor, staff in hand,
walking a little stiffly, his hat tilted on the back of his head, or
carried in his hand, that he might the more easily look up at La Masane
when he came in sight of his birthplace.

The Alcalde-miller's towers stood out dazzlingly white, the sails
turning merrily as if at play. They made her giddy to look at long. But
no sturdy Jean-Marie was to be seen, his bust thrown out, the stiff fuzz
of his beard half a foot before him as he walked, every way a solid man,
and worthy to be chief magistrate of a greater town than Collioure.
Only, just at that moment, Claire could not see him.

The whip-lash path, running perilously along the cliff-edge towards
Elne, was broken by no slowly-crawling white speck, the mule bestridden
by Don Jordy, Notary Episcopal of the ancient See of the Bishops of
Elne.

Remained for Claire--the Senora, the goats.

Now it chanced that the night before, the Alcalde Jean-Marie, grappling
for small-talk in the dense medium of his brain, had thought to point
out to Claire a little ravine far away to the left, beyond the pasture
limits of La Masane. The Alcalde was strong on local topography. That,
he said, was the famous sweet-water fountain and Chapel of the
Consolation. You found your fate there. Young girls saw their husband
that was to be, upon dropping a pin into its depths in the twilight.
Good young women (imaginatively given) sometimes saw the Virgin, or
thought they did. While bad men, stooping to drink, certainly saw the
devil looking up at them--in the plain clear mirror of that sweet-water
spring.

A most various spring--useful, too! She might see--but Claire did not
anticipate even to herself what or whom she hoped to see. At any rate,
pending the arrival of her three male servitors, she would go--there
could be no harm in just going--to the Spring of the Consolation, hid
deep in that bosky dell over which the willow and oleander cast so
pleasant a shade.

Claire snatched a broad Navarrese bonnet and went.

* * * * *

"My sweet cousin, I bid you welcome," a voice spoke, mocking a little,
but quiet and penetrating.

Hastily Claire let the laurel branch slip back, stood upright like a
startled fawn, and--found herself in face of Raphael Llorient, who at
the other