flowed
under tall trees, and turned the wheels of the oldest flour-mills in
Flanders. This was a favorite resort of Barty's,--and he had it
pretty much to himself.

And for Lady Caroline there were, besides St. Rombault, quite
half-a-dozen churches almost as magnificent if not so big, and in
them as many as you could wish of old Flemish masters, beginning
with Peter Paul Rubens, who pervades the land of his birth very much
as Michael Angelo pervades Florence and Rome.

And these dim places of Catholic worship were generously open to
all, every day and all day long, and never empty of worshippers,
high and low, prostrate in the dust, or kneeling with their arms
extended and their heads in the air, their wide-open, immovable,
unblinking eyes hypnotized into stone by the cross and the crown of
thorns. Mostly peasant women, these: with their black hoods falling
from their shoulders, and stiff little close white caps that hid the
hair.

Out of cool shadowy recesses of fretted stone and admirably carved
wood emanations seemed to rise as from the long-forgotten past--tons
of incense burnt hundreds of years ago, and millions of closely
packed supplicants, rich and poor, following each other in secula
seculorum! Lady Caroline spent many of her hours haunting these
crypts--and praying there.

At the back of their house in the Rue des Ursulines Blanches,
Barty's bedroom window overlooked the playground of the convent "des
Soeurs Redemptoristines": all noble ladies, most beautifully dressed
In scarlet and ultramarine, with long snowy veils, and who were
Waited upon by non-noble sisters in garments of a like hue but less
expensive texture.

So at least said little Finche Torfs, the daughter of the
house--little Frau, as Lady Caroline called her, and who seems to
have been one of the best creatures in the world; she became warmly
attached to both her lodgers, who reciprocated the feeling in full;
it was her chief pleasure to wait on them and look after them at all
times of the day, though Lady Caroline had already a devoted maid of
her own.

Little Frau's father was a well-to-do burgher with a prosperous
ironmongery in the "Petit Brul."

This was his private house, where he pursued his hobby, for he was
an amateur photographer, very fond of photographing his kind and
simple-minded old wife, who was always attired in rich Brussels
silks and Mechelen lace on purpose. She even cooked in them, though
not for her lodgers, whos