he strange ways of the family.
Jacqueline, however, did not stay long enough to know much of those ways.

She arrived, poor thing, with weary wing, like some bird, who, escaping
from the fowler's net, where it has left its feathers, flies straight to
the spot where a sportsman lies ready to shoot it. She was received with
the same cries of joy, the same kisses, the same demonstrations of
affection, as those which, the summer before, had welcomed her to the Rue
de Naples. They told her she could sleep on a sofa, exactly like the one
on which she had passed that terrible night which had resulted in her
expulsion from the convent; and it was decided that she must stay several
days, at least, before she went on to Paris, to begin the life of hard
study and courageous work which would make of her a great singer.

Tired?--No, she was hardly tired at all. The journey over the enchanting
road of the Corniche had awakened in her a fervor of admiration which
prevented her from feeling any bodily needs, and now she seemed to have
reached fairyland, where the verdure of the tropics was like the hanging
gardens of Babylon, only those had never had a mirror to reflect back
their ancient, far-famed splendor, like that before her eyes, as she
looked down upon the Mediterranean, with the sun setting in the west in a
sky all crimson and gold.

Notwithstanding the disorder of her travelling-dress, Jacqueline allowed
her friend to take her straight from the railway station to the Terrace
of Monte Carlo. She fell into ecstasies at sight of the African cacti,
the century plants, and the fig-trees of Barbary, covering the low walls
whence they looked down into the water; at the fragrance of the
evergreens that surrounded the beautiful palace with its balustrades,
dedicated to all the worst passions of the human race; with the sharp
rocky outline of Turbia; with an almost invisible speck on the horizon
which they said was Corsica; with everything, which, whether mirage or
reality, lifted her out of herself, and plunged her into that state of
excited happiness and indescribable sense of bodily comfort, which
exterior impressions so easily produce upon the young.

After exhausting her vocabulary in exclamations and in questions, she
stood silent, watching the sun as it sank beneath the waters, thinking
that life is well worth living if it can give us such glorious
spectacles, notwithstanding all the difficulties that may have to be
passed thr