she had been, and
not more than half as disagreeable. Although the sky looked as if it
might burst into tears at any moment, and although Orange has nothing
but historic remains and historic records to show, she was ready to
start, almost cheerfully, at ten o'clock.

I was allowed to be of the party, laden with mackintoshes for my master
and mistress; and I didn't admire the triumphal arch at Orange nearly as
much as I had admired the smaller and older one at St. Remy. But Lady
Turnour admired it far more, and was so nice to Sir Samuel that he
thought it _the_ arch of the world. They put their heads together over
the same volume of Baedeker, which was an exquisite pleasure to the poor
man, and he was so pathetic I could have cried into his footsteps, as he
read (pronouncing almost everything wrong) about the building of the
Arch of Tiberius. "Why, that's just like a sweet little statuette I used
to have standing on a table in my drawing-room window!" exclaimed Lady
Turnour, looking up at the beautiful Winged Victory. "You might think it
was a copy!"

Although the histories say Orange wasn't very important in Roman days,
it has taken revenge by letting everything not Roman fall into decay,
except, of course, its memories of the family through which William the
Silent of Holland became William of Orange. The house of the first
William of Orange, the hero of song who rode back wounded from
Roncesvalles to his waiting wife, is gone now, save for a wall and a
buttress or two on a lonely hill of the old town; yet the arch, which
was old when his chateau was begun, still towers dark yellow as
tarnished Etruscan gold against the sky; and the Roman theatre is the
grandest out of Italy. Lady Turnour could not see why the Comedie
Francaise should produce plays there, even once a year, when they could
do it so much more comfortably at any modern theatre in the provinces
if they _must_ travel; and as to the gathering of the Felibres, she
didn't even know what Felibres were, nor did she care, as she was
unlikely to meet any in society. She would have proposed going on
somewhere else, as there was so "little to see in Orange," but that rain
came sweeping down, cold from the east, when I had followed the pair a
quarter of a mile from the motor. They fled into their mackintoshes as a
hermit-crab flees into his borrowed shell, and I was the only one the
worse for wear when we reached the car. I didn't much mind the wetting,
but it was