to
the sea, where charming little bays shone behind enlacing branches, blue
as the eyes of a wood-nymph gleaming shyly through the brown tangle of
her hair. Pine balsam mingled with the bitter-sweet perfume of almond
blossom, and caught a pungent tang of salt from the wind.

What romance--what beauty! It made me in love with life, just to pass
this way, and know that so much hidden loveliness existed. I glanced
furtively over my shoulder at the couple whose honeymoon it is--our
master and mistress. Lady Turnour sat nodding in the conservatory
atmosphere of her glass cage, and Sir Samuel was earnestly choosing a
cigar.

Suddenly it struck me that Providence must have a vast sense of humour,
and that the little inhabitants of this earth, high and low, must
afford It a great deal of benevolent amusement.

All too soon we swept out of the forest, straight into a little town,
St. Maxime, with a picturesque port of its own, where red-sailed fishing
boats lolled as idly as the dark-eyed young men in cafes near the shore.
A few tourists walking out from the hotel on the hill gazed rather
curiously at us in our fine blue car; and we gazed away from them,
across a sapphire gulf, to the distant houses of St. Tropez, banked high
against a promontory of emerald.

I should have liked to run on to St. Tropez, for I knew his pretty
legend; how he was one of the guards of St. Paul in prison, and was
converted by the eloquence of his captive; but the chauffeur said that,
after La Foux (famed home of miniature horses) the coast road would lose
its surface of velvet. It would be laced in and out with crossings of a
local railway line, and there would be so many bumps that Lady Turnour
was certain to wake up very cross.

"For your sake I don't want to make her cross," said he, and turned
inland; but the way was no less beautiful. The pines were tired of
running after us, but great cork trees marched beside the road, like an
army of crusaders in disarray, half in, half out, of armour. Above, rose
the Mountains of the Moors, whose very name seemed to ring with the
distant echo of a Saracen war song; and here and there, on a bare, wild
hillside, towered all that was left of some ancient castle, fallen into
ruin. Cogolin was fine, and Grimaud was even finer.

Up a steep ascent, through shadowy forests we had passed, now and then
coming suddenly upon a little red-roofed village nestling among the
trees as a strawberry among its leaves, w