him to sit for you, you'd find him a good subject for inspiring the the big thing."

"I should n't wonder. He's an able man certainly and a good fellow."

Herbert strove to speak with enthusiasm, but there was a deadness in his voice. When he raised his eyes, Madelaine was looking down the path towards the new statue.

"It's the oddest thing," she said after a moment, "that I never noticed the Cupid when I sat out here yesterday afternoon."

This remark aggravated his sense of injury. "If you ́sat out here, I don't see how you could have helped seeing it,"

he said.

"I was facing away from it and Joe does n't notice such things. Besides we got so interested talking- one does, sometimes. I'm afraid you thought me very rude not to have sent you some acknowledgment."

"Oh, no. It was presented so casually that I expected the acknowledgment to be casual."

He spoke stiffly; the thought of that engrossing conversation with Joe Morrison filled him with questions that could not be asked and forebodings that were most disturbing. And just then Joe Morrison appeared. He was as goodlooking as Madelaine had said, and he came strolling down the garden path with what seemed to Herbert the unconscious grace of a triumphant bank president.

"Hello, Herbert; how are you, old man? " Joe's greeting was cordial tainted, however, Herbert thought, with a subtle hospitality. Business men had such a way of slipping comfortably into the most ecstatic human relations and taking them as a matter of course. "Been having a good summer? - Quite a productive one, I see. Madelaine has had me dabbling in one of your kindred arts."

"Then you've finished your poem?" said Madelaine. "Do recite it; I don't want to run after the guest-book."

,, I am going away,

And the things urbane That I would say

Ere I take the train

I find it hard,

Not being a bard,

To embody in verse for Madelaine. " "That is merely dodging the issue," Isaid Madelaine.

"No, it's coming up to the scratch,” said Herbert. "So you're leaving soon?" "In about half-an hour."

Thereupon Herbert bade him goodby. He certainly would not intrude upon their last half-hour. The cheerfulness, the masterfulness in Joe's manner, the way in which Madelaine had harked back to Joe it was all conclusive. "She ought to have told me there was definitely some one else," he thought; and then he excused her; no doubt it had just happened - within a few days, a few hours.

At home Herbert sat in his studio and gazed at the figure on which he had been working so hopefully, so happily. The achievement to which his heart had been urging him had been so bound up with the attainment of his heart's desire. He felt that he would never be able to go on with it now. He felt so about it for three days, and then he was seized with a determination to finish it and make it the best thing he had ever done to finish it, not in the lyrical spirit in which he had begun it, but as a testimony to himself of his character.

"If I can put it through now muttered sometimes while he worked "if I can put it through now!”

he

And so on this test for his own inward eye, heedless of the achievement as it might affect any one else, or as it might affect his own fortunes, he concentrated all his mind and heart. And he soon knew that he was making a thing better than he had dreamed of making.

And all this time he did not once see

"Pretty good for me." They passed through the garden brilliant with white phlox and white hollyhocks, and then through an orchard of apple trees. Beyond that appeared the studio, a square white building, with rosebushes planted along the wall. Herbert unlocked the door.

Madelaine entered; before her was the clay image of a young woman holding a baby in her arms; the baby gazed upward, wide-eyed and smiling, and the young woman smiled down at him as if wondering what the baby saw and what thought was pleasant in his brain. But there was more than an amused sympathy declared; there was a joyous isolation and detachment an unconscious happiness in the fact that there within her arms she held her entire world.

Herbert had been watching Madelaine's face. He saw the look of expectancy lighten into surprised pleasure

and then, after a moment, darken into doubt. In sudden alarm he looked from Madelaine to the statue.

In that glance the truth stabbed him. Only the faintest suggestion of a personality and yet and yet too much! With sickness and sorrow in his heart he turned again to Madelaine; her cheeks were aflame.

He stepped over to the statue, caught up a mallet, and dashed it into the happy, smiling face; and where before had been the joy and pride of motherhood was now merely a blot of clay.

"Oh!"

The girl uttered the involuntary cry, made the involuntary step forward; her face was now white. Before she could draw back Herbert caught both her wrists and held them in tight, trembling hands.

"Madelaine," he said, and his voice trembled like his hands, "I did n't know - till you stood here I did n't realize I'm sure nobody but you and me could ever have seen and I did n't -believe me, I did n't, till just now! I'm sorry to have hurt you; it's the last thing I could ever have wanted to do!" "I'm sorry I'm so sorry!" Madelaine's voice was piteously appealing, as if she herself had been in some way to blame. "To have to spoil anything that must have cost you SO labor - "

SO much

"So much love! I never thought — I was possessed with my idea my ideal, Madelaine." His voice choked for a moment; then he went on. "I thought I knew you better than you knew yourself -I'd seen so much in your eyes, I'd watched you so when you looked at those little children that I'd done - I thought I could prove something to you with this. I was doing it all for you, Madelaine."

"What can I say? Oh, I'm sorry, Herbert." And then, as he still held her wrists, she said, "Please, Herbert please let me go.'

He obeyed at once. "I beg your par

don."

He recovered something of his old light manner. "I was n't aware of what I was doing just as in the other thing. I hope I did n't hurt you?" "No, it was n't that - only I must go." But she lingered in the doorway; the light fell on her dark hair and soft eyes, her lips were parted uncertainly as if she had not said all that in her sympathy she would like to say.

He startled her by stepping forward and exclaiming in a sudden, authoritative voice, "You can't go yet. Give me your hands again." He took them; in her bewilderment she did not resist. "Now then, look at me. Do you remember my saying that I did n't see how any girl ever could love any man until after she had somehow belonged to him? That ruin there—you know now that somehow you belong to me. Madelaine," he drew her hands closer to him and his eyes shone with a humor

that was nearly all tenderness, -"I dare you to look me in the eyes; I dare you, Madelaine.”

She did not respond; her hands were trembling now. "Come," he urged; there was gentle, coaxing laughter in his voice. "I never knew you when you lacked courage, Madelaine. I dare you to look me in the eyes.”

Then she met his challenge with a faint smile on her lips and with eyes that were steady and brave.

"And don't flinch. For you do love me, Madelaine, you do, you do, you know you do!" He bent and kissed her and drew her close, and then held her, murmuring, "Oh, my dear, my dear!

"Oh Herbert!" She looked up at him with radiant wet eyes. Her lips were trembling; she put one hand on his shoulder and said, "Herbert, I believe I believe I do; " and gently she drew his face down to hers.

II

POITIERS TO THE PYRENEES

THE road from Poitiers to Angoulême carries one through a country rolling and various in line-a country with a dash of Normandy in it, but facing south instead of west.

The villages are fewer than in Normandy, and make less mark in the landscape; but the way passes through two drowsy little towns, Civray and Ruffec, each distinguished by the possession of an important church of the typical Romanesque of Poitou. That at Civray, in particular, is remarkable enough to form the object of a special pilgrimage, and to find it precisely in one's path

seemed part of the general brightness of the day. Here again are the sculptured archivolt and the rich imagery of Poitiers

one strange mutilated figure of a headless horseman dominating the front from the great arcade above the doorway, as at the church of the Sainte Croix in Bordeaux; but the façade of Civray is astonishingly topped by fifteenth-century machicolations, which somehow, in spite of their later date, give it an air of greater age, of reaching back to a wild warring past.

Angoulême, set on a promontory between Charente and Anguienne, commands to the north, south and east a vast circuit of meadowy and woody undula

tions. The interior of the town struck one as dull, and without characteristic detail; but on the front of the twelfthcentury cathedral, perched near the ledge of the cliff above the Anguienne, detail abounds as profusely as on the façade of Notre Dame at Poitiers. It is, however, so much less subordinate to the general conception that one remembers rather the garlanding of archivolts, the clustering of figures in countless niches and arcades, than the fundamental lines which should serve to bind them together; and the interior, roofed with cupolas after the manner of Saint Hilaire of Poitiers, is singularly stark and barrenlooking.

But when one has paid due tribute to the cathedral one is called on, from its doorway, to recognize Angoulême's other striking distinction: its splendid natural site, and the way in which art has used and made the most of it. Starting from a long leafy cours with private hotels, a great avenue curves about the whole length of the walls, breaking midway into a terrace boldly hung above the valley, and ending in another leafy place, beneath which the slope of the hill has been skilfully transformed into a public garden. Angoulême now thrives on the manufacture of paper, and may therefore conceivably permit herself such civic adornments; but how of the many small hill-towns of France- such as Laon or Thiers, for instance - which apparently have only their past glory to subsist on, yet manage to lead up the admiring pilgrim by way of these sweeping approaches, encircling terraces and symmetrically-planted esplanades? One can only salute once again the invincible French passion for form and fit

at last; not the hot delicately-pencilled Mediterranean south, which has always a hint of the East in it, but the temperate Aquitanian midi cooled by the Gulf of Gascony. As one nears Bordeaux the country grows less broken, the horizon line flatter; but there is one really noble impression, when, from the bridge of Saint André de Cubzac, one looks out on the lordly sweep of the Dordogne, just before it merges its waters with the Garonne to form the great estuary of the Gironde. Soon after comes an endless dusty faubourg, then the long stone bridge over the Garonne, and the proud river-front of Bordeaux a screen of eighteenth-century buildings stretched along the crescent-shaped quay. Bordeaux, thus approached, has indeed, as the guide-book says, fort grand air; and again one returns thanks to the motor, which almost always, avoiding the mean purlieus of the railway station, gives one these romantic or stately first impressions.

This river-front of Bordeaux is really little more than the architectural screen, a street or two deep, of a bustling, bright but featureless commercial town, which, from the Middle Ages to the close of the eighteenth century, seems to have crowded all its history along the curve of the Garonne. Even the early church of the Holy Cross-contemporaneous with Notre Dame la Grande of Poitiers -lifts its triple row of Romanesque arcades but a few yards from the river; and close by is Saint Michel, a stately example of late Gothic, with the unusual adjunct of a detached bell-tower, not set at an angle, in Italian fashion, but facing the church squarely from a little green enclosure across the street. But these vestiges of old Bordeaux, in spite of their intrinsic interest, are, on the whole, less characteristic, less personal, than the mise-en-scène of its long quay: a row of fine old hôtels with sculptured pediments and stately doorways, broken midway by the symmetrical buildings of the Exchange and the Custom House, and

extending from the Arch of Triumph opposite the Pont de Bordeaux to the great Place des Quinconces, with its rostral columns and balustraded terrace above the river.

To the modern traveller there is food for thought in the fact that Bordeaux owes this great decorative composition -in which should be included the theatre unfolding its majestic peristyle at the head of the Place de la Comédie to the magnificent taste and free expenditure of the Intendant Tourny, who ruled the province of Guyenne in the eighteenth century. Except at such high moments of æsthetic sensibility as produced the monuments of republican Italy all large schemes of civic adornment have been due to the initiative of one man, and executed without much regard to the rights of the tax-payer; and should the citizen of a modern republic too rashly congratulate himself on exemption from the pillage productive of such results, he might with equal reason remark that the tribute lawfully extracted from him sometimes seems to produce no results whatever.

On leaving Bordeaux we deserted the route nationale along the flat west bank of the Garonne, and re-crossing the Pont de Bordeaux ran south through the whitewine region between Garonne and Dordogne that charming strip of country which, because of the brackishness of the river tides, goes by the unexpected name of Entre-deux-Mers. For several miles we skirted a line of white houses, half villa, half château, set in well-kept gardens; then came vineyards, as exquisitely kept, and packed into every cranny of the rocky côteaux, save where here and there a little town broke the view of the river-chief among them Langoiron, with its fine fortress-ruin, and Cadillac enclosed in stout quadrangular walls.

The latter place has the interest of being one of those symmetrically designed towns which, toward the close of the Middle Ages, were founded throughout

southwestern France to draw "back to the land" a population depleted and demoralized by long years of warfare and barbarian invasion. These curious madeto-order towns bastides or villes neuves

were usually laid out on a rectilinear plan, with a town-hall forming the centre of an arcaded market-place, to which four streets led from gateways in the four walls. Among the most characteristic examples are Aigues Mortes, which Saint Louis called into existence to provide himself with a Mediterranean port, and Cordes, near Gaillac, founded a little later by Count Raymond of Toulouse, and somewhat ambitiously named by him after the city of Cordova.

At Cadillac the specific physiognomy of the medieval bastide is overshadowed by the lofty proportions and high pitched roof of the château which a sixteenth century Duke of Epernon planted in an angle of the walls. The adjoining parish church — itself of no mean dimensions was once but the private chapel of these same dukes, who have left such a large architectural impress on their small shabby town; and one grieves to learn that the chief monument of their rule has fallen to base uses, and been stripped of the fine interior decorations which its majestic roof once sheltered.

Southwest of Cadillac the road passes through a vast stretch of pine forest with a dry aromatic undergrowth- an outskirt of the great "Landes" that reach inward from the Gulf of Gascony. On and on runs the white shadow-barred highway, between ranges of red boles and sunflecked heathy clearings - and when, after long hours, one emerges from the unwonted mystery and solitude of this piny desert into the usual busy agricultural France, the land is breaking southward into hilly waves, and beyond the hills are the Pyrenees.

Yet one's first real sight of them so masked are they by lesser ranges — is got next day from the terrace at Pau,