asure,
of his life. All that he dispassionately admired in his wife was, so he
sometimes told himself with satisfaction, repeated in his daughters.
Clairette and Jacqueline had inherited their mother's look of race, her
fastidiousness and refinement of bearing, while fortunately lacking
Claire's dangerous personal beauty, her touch of eccentricity, and her
discontent with life--or rather with the life which Jacques de Wissant,
in spite of a gnawing ache and longing that nothing could still or
assuage, yet found good.

The Mayor of Falaise looked strangely out of keeping with his present
surroundings, at least so he would have seemed to the eye of any
foreigner, especially of any Englishman, who had seen him standing
there.

He was a narrowly built man, forty-three years of age, and his
clean-shaven, rather fleshy face was very pale. On this hot August
morning he was dressed in a light grey frock-coat, under which he wore a
yellow waistcoat, and on his wife's writing-table lay his tall hat and
lemon-coloured gloves.

As mayor of his native town--a position he owed to an historic name and
to his wealth, and not to his very moderate Republican opinions--his
duties included the celebration of civil marriages, and to-day, it being
the 14th of August, the eve of the Assumption, and still a French
national fete, there were to be a great many weddings celebrated in the
Hotel de Ville.

Jacques de Wissant considered that he owed it to himself, as well as to
his fellow-citizens, to appear "correctly" attired on such occasions. He
had a deep, wordless contempt for those of his acquaintances who dressed
on ceremonial occasions "a l'anglaise," that is, in loose lounge suits
and straw hats.

* * * * *

Suddenly there broke on his ear the sound of a low, full voice, singing.
It came from the next room, his wife's bedroom, and the mournful
passionate words of an old sea ballad rang out, full of a desolate pain
and sense of bitter loss.

The sound irritated him shrewdly, and there came back to him a fragment
of conversation he had not thought of for ten years. During a discussion
held between his father and mother in this very room about their adored
only son's proposed marriage with Claire de Kergouet, his father had
said: "There is one thing I do not much care for; she is, they say, very
musical, and Jacques, even as a baby, howled like a dog whenever he
heard singing!" And his mother had laugh