g women and pretty women--pah, she could not abide them!
And by this we can guess her age, for not so long ago she had been young
and even pretty herself.

The tide that comes in the affairs of men is not nearly so marked as the
ebb which comes in the affairs of women.

Claire stood a long while meditating, her eyes following the movement of
the market-place vaguely, but without any real care for what was
happening. She truly mourned her father, but she possessed much of that
almost exclusively masculine temperament which says after any
catastrophe, "Well, what is the next thing to be done?"

"I care nothing about my mother's people," she meditated to herself,
"but I would see her home, her land, her country."

She had never seen her father's. But when he had spoken to her of the
fresh winds, lashing rains, and driving snows, with nevertheless the
rose blooming in the sheltered corners about the old house on Christmas
Day, she had somehow known it all. But Collioure and its sand-dunes, the
deep sapphire of the southern sea, cut across by the paler blue line of
the sky--she could not imagine that, even when the Professor and the
Abbe John, with tears glittering in their eyes, spoke together in the
strange pathetic speech of _la petite patrie_.

But she would like to see it--the strand where the little Colette had
played, the dunes down which she had slidden, and the gold and rose of
the towers of Chateau Collioure, within which her mother was born.

A noise without attracted her attention. A procession was entering the
square. In the midst was a huge coach with six mules, imported, equipage
and all, from Spain. An outrider in the episcopal livery was mounted on
each mule, while running footmen scattered the market-stalls and
salad-barrows like the passage of a sudden strong wind.

There was also great excitement down below in the Golden Lark. The
kitchen emptied itself, and Madame Celeste stopped hastily to pin a bow
of ribbons to her cap, unconscious that a long smear of sooty grease
decorated one side of her nose. The Bishop's carriage was coming in
state to the Golden Lark! There could not be the least doubt of it. And
the Bishop himself was within, that holy man who so much more willingly
handled the sword-hilt than the crozier--Bishop Pierrefonds of Orleans,
certain archbishop and possible cardinal, a stoop of the League in all
the centre of France.

Yes, he was conveying home his guests in state. He stepped