y life. They prefer to wear out themselves and their best
attributes on the pavement."

Madame smiled.

"Everything is so strong about you," she said; "especially your
prejudices. And this house to which we are to be sent--is it large? Is
it well situated? May one inquire?"

I could not understand her eyes, which were averted with something
like a smile.

"It is one of the best situated houses in England," I answered,
unguardedly, and Madame laughed outright.

"My friend," she said, "one reason why I like you is that you are not
at all clever. This house is yours, and you are offering Lucille and
me a home in our time of trouble--and I accept."

She laid her hand, as light as a leaf, on my shoulder, and when I
looked up she was gone.

On the morning of Saturday, September 3d, I received a note from John
Turner.

"If you have not gone--go!" he wrote.

Our departure had been fixed for a later date, but the yacht of an
English friend had been lying in the port of Fecamp at my disposal for
some days. We embarked there the same evening, having taken train at
the St. Lazare station within two hours of the receipt of John
Turner's warning. The streets of Paris, as we drove through them, were
singularly quiet, and men passing their friends on the pavement nodded
in silence, without exchanging other greeting. Hope seemed at last to
have folded her wings and fled from the bright city. Some indefinable
knowledge of coming catastrophe hovered over all.

It was a quiet sunset that clothed sea and sky with a golden
splendour as we steamed out of Fecamp harbour that evening. I walked
on the deck of the trim yacht with its captain until a late hour, and
looked my last on the white cliffs and headlands of the doomed land
about midnight--the hour at which the news was spreading over France,
as black, swift and terrible as night itself, that hope was dead, that
the whole army had been captured at Sedan, and the Emperor himself
made prisoner. All this, however, we did not learn until we landed in
England, although I have no doubt that John Turner knew it when he
gave us so sharp a warning.

The weather was favourable to us, and the ladies came on deck the next
morning in a calm sea as we sped past the North Foreland between the
Goodwin Lightships and the land. It was a lovely morning, and the sea
all stripes of deep blue and green, and even yellow where the great
sand banks of the Thames estuary lay beneath the rippled surfa