osom and looked
frightened. The child was precious to her. She had paid a higher price than
most women, and that perhaps enhanced its value.

At Fecamp a rusty ramshackle diligence awaited them. Their luggage,
together with hen-coops, baskets, bundles, packing-cases, were piled on top
in an amorphous heap. They took their places inside together with an old
priest and a peasant woman in a great flapping cap. The old priest absorbed
snuff in great quantities and used a red handkerchief. The closed windows
of the vehicle rattled, it was very hot, and the antiquated cushions
smelled abominably. Emmy, tired of the railway journey and suffocated by
the heat, felt inclined to cry. This was her first step into her newly
conditioned world, and her heart sank. She regretted her comfortable rooms
in Paris and the conditions of existence there of which Septimus was an
integral part. She had got used to them, to his forced association with the
intimate details of her life, to his bending over the child like a
grotesque fairy godfather and making astonishing suggestions for its
upbringing. She had regarded him less as a stranger to be treated with
feminine reserve than the doctor. Now it was different. She was about to
take up her own life again, with new responsibilities, and the dearly loved
creature whom she had bullied and laughed at and leaned on would go away to
take up his own queer way of life, and the relations between them could not
possibly be the same again. The diligence was taking her on the last stage
of her journey towards the new conditions, and it jolted and bumped and
smelled and took an interminable time.

"I'm sure," said she woefully, "there's no such place as Hottetot-sur-Mer,
and we are going on forever to find it."

Presently Septimus pointed triumphantly through the window.

"There it is!"

"Where?" cried Emmy, for not a house was in sight. Then she saw the board.

The old diligence turned and creaked and swung and pitched down the gorge.
When they descended at the Hotel de la Plage, the setting sun blazed on
their faces across the sea and shed its golden enchantment over the little
pebbly beach. At that hour the only living thing on it was the dog, and he
was asleep. It was a spot certainly to which the fashionable did not
resort.

"It will be good for baby."

"And for you."

She shrugged her shoulders. "What is good for one is not always--" She
paused, feeling ungrateful. Then she added, "It's th