are the only honest people, and she and her cargo of fishermen,
with an old man named Bontemps, are now heaven knows where since I met
them at Portofino.

"She calls them her children and when I last saw her she was coming
along the little quay at Portofino helping that big red bearded man to
carry provisions.

"The times are revolutionary, that's the truth, and women are not what
they were, and I am old, I suppose, and cannot see things as I ought to
see them--and the grief is she might have married any one, she might
have married Royalty itself, and I told her so and she laughed in my
face. She said she never intended to marry any one, that she already had
a family of 'children' and that the great bearded man Raft was the
smallest of them all, that she was teaching him to read and write and to
talk French so that he could converse with the rest of her family.

"She has made Portofino her headquarters, it seems, and she is the lady
bountiful of the fishing folk there, sits in their cottages and talks to
them, taking up her quarters at the little _auberge_ and sometimes
living on board her boat.

"A strange life, and yet she seems happy, like that poor Mademoiselle La
Fontaine, whom I last saw at the Maison de Sante of Doctor
Schwanthaller, seated with a straw crown on her head and imagining
herself a queen."

There ended the letter of Madame de Brie, and here ends the story of
Cleo de Bromsart, a woman of energy and mind who learned from Kerguelen
that Life is an endless striving, not a peaceful drifting, and that of
all things high the highest is the soul of a child.

THE END

End of Project Gutenberg's The Beach of Dreams, by H. De Vere Stacpoole

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