ee, too, that they will do nicely." She spread the
frocks on the bed, and began snipping here and there with the scissors
and taking stitches everywhere. "By letting it out this way--voila, if
madame will kindly slip it on?"

"Berthe, you can't mean--Oh nonsense!"

None the less the skirt passed over her head, and the maid's deft
fingers kept on busily. "And why not?" she talked as she worked, "unless
one likes rags better. And who will see? Only men. Poof, those citizens
do not know percale from a Parisian toilette."

Jacqueline began to wax angry with the quiet tyranny of it. She looked
at the horror and shuddered, then with both hands pushed the calico to
the floor, gathering up her own lawn skirt instead. It was rather a
woebegone lawn skirt. She gazed ruefully at the garment, then down at
the blue flowering heaped about her ankles. Berthe, kneeling over the
dress, raised her eyes. The puckered brow of her mistress spelled fury,
and the maid tried not to laugh, at which Jacqueline stamped her foot.
"Berthe," she cried, "shall I slap you?"

"Mais oui, madame. And madame, I was thinking, what will he say if you
do not wear it?"

Jacqueline gave her a keen look. "Child, child," she exclaimed, "you
seem to imagine that whatever _he_ wants----"

"Oui, madame.--I think you can try it on again now."

And madame submitted petulantly. But to herself she had to confess the
magic in Berthe's fingers. Though she pouted over the fresh, rustic
effect, yet on her slender figure there was witchery in it.

An orderly knocked. He was one of her Austrian escorts come to say that
everything was ready for departure. She gladly hailed the chance to
escape this house of mourning. All night long old women in the death
chamber had mumbled incantations, and the droning was in her ears as she
slept. It was not nice. Because she could not blot out the inartistic
shock of ugly mortality, in very self-hate she yearned to get away. The
evening before, even while she loaned common sense to the crazed
household, even while she pressed down the icy eyelids, she
wondered--obstinately wondered, despite herself, what the dead girl
could have thought, what she could have felt, during that one horrid,
thrilling second of flight downward, and what, in anticipation of the
second after. It was gruesome, this being always and always the
spectator. Yet Jacqueline knew that, had it been she herself plunging
from the tower, she still would have been th