ere. I don't recognize the castle it shows."

"That's in Bayonne," she said, and paused, her eyes speculatively on
him.

"No, Heavens no! You don't need to tell me that it's not Bayonne, New
Jersey!" he answered her unspoken question violently. This made her
laugh, opening her long eyes a little. He went on, "I've been as far as
Pau, but never went into the Basque country."

"Oh, Pau." She said no more than this, but Welles had the impression
that these words somehow had made a comment on Vincent's information.
Vincent seemed to think so too, and curiously enough not to think it a
very favorable comment. He looked, what he almost never looked, a little
nettled, and spoke a little stiffly. "It's a very fine specimen," he
said briefly, looking again at the photograph.

"Oh, it looks very much finer and bigger in the photograph than it
really is," she told them. "It's only a bandbox of a thing compared with
Coucy or Pierrefonds or any of the northern ones. It was built, you
know, like the Cathedral at Bayonne, when the Plantagenets still held
that country, but after they were practically pretty near English, and
both the chateau and the Gothic cathedral seem queer aliens among the
southern natives. I have the photograph up there on the wall only
because of early associations. I lived opposite it long ago when I was a
little girl."

This, to Mr. Welles, was indistinguishable from the usual talk of people
who have been "abroad." To tell the truth they always sounded to him
more or less "showing-off," though he humbly tried to think it was only
because he could never take any part in such talk. He certainly did not
see anything in the speech to make Vincent look at her, almost with his
jaw dropped. He himself paid little attention to what she was now
saying, because he could not keep his mind from the lingering sweet
intonations of her voice. What difference did it make where she had
lived as a little girl? She was going to live next door to him now; what
an awfully nice woman she was, and quite a good-looking woman too, with
a very nice figure, although not in her very first youth, of course. How
old could she be? Between thirty and forty of course, but You couldn't
tell where. His personal taste was not for such a long face as hers. But
you didn't notice that when she smiled. He liked the way she did her
black hair, too, so smooth and shining and close to her head. It looked
as though she'd really combed and brushed it