his friendly eagerness
for my answer.

"Oh, yes, I saw to it that she did that," replied Mr. Dane, with
conscious virtue in the achievement.

"It is for luck, isn't it?" I said, to make conversation.

"And more especially for love," came the unexpected answer.

"For love!" I exclaimed.

"But yes," chuckled the old man. "If a young girl puts her hand on the
Hand of Fatima at Arles, that hand puts love into hers. Her fate is
sealed within the month, so it is said."

"Nonsense!" remarked Mr. Dane, "I never heard that silly story before."
And he went on eating his dinner with extraordinary nonchalance and an
unusual, almost abnormal, appetite.

CHAPTER XIX

I shall always feel that I dreamed Aigues Mortes: that I fell asleep at
night--oh, but fell very far, so much farther than one usually falls
even when one wakes with the sensation of dropping from a great height,
that I went bumping down, down from century to century, until I touched
earth in a strange, drear land, to find I had gone back in time about
seven hundred years.

Not that there is a conspicuous amount either of land or earth at Aigues
Mortes, City of Dead Waters--if the place really does exist, which I
begin to doubt already; but I have only to shut my eyes to call it up;
and in my memory I shall often use it as a background for some mediaeval
picture painted with my mind. For with my mind I can rival Raphael. It
is only when I try to execute my fancies that I fail, and then they "all
come different," which is heart breaking. But it will be something to
have the background always ready.

The dream did not begin while we spun gaily from Arles to Aigues Mortes,
through pleasant if sometimes puerile-seeming country (puerile only
because we hadn't its history dropping from our fingers' ends); but
there was time, between coming in sight of the huge, gray-brown towers
and driving in through the fortified gateway, for me to take that great
leap from the present far down into the past.

To my own surprise, I didn't want to think of the motor-car. It had
brought us to older places, but within this walled quadrangle it was as
if we had come full tilt into a picture; and the automobile was not an
artistic touch. Ingrate that I was, I turned my back upon the Aigle, and
was thankful when Sir Samuel and Lady Turnour walked out of my sight
around the corner of the picture. I pretended, when they had
disappeared, that I had painted them out, and that th