town at the hill-foot, seemed rather the parent stock from which the
other had emancipated itself. For all down the steep slope that fled
from Upper to King's Cobb was flung a _debris_ of houses that, like the
ice-fall of a glacier, would appear to have broken from the main body
and gone careering into the valley below.

It was in point of fact, however, but a subordinate hamlet--a hanging
garden for the jaded tourist in the dog days, when his soul stifled in
the oven of the sea-level cliffs--an eyrie for Plancine, and for George,
the earnest painter, a Paradise before the fall.

And now says George, "We have talked all round your confession, and still
I wait to give you absolution."

"I will confess. I read it in one of papa's books that is called the
_Talmud_."

"Gracious me! you should be careful. What did you read?"

"That whoever wants to see the souls of the dead--"

"Plancine!"

"--must take finely sifted ashes, and strew them round his bed; and in
the morning he will see their foot-tracks, as a cock's. I did it."

"You did?"

"Last night, yes. And what a business I had afterwards sweeping them up!"

"And did you see anything?"

"Something--yes--I think so. But it might have been mice. There are
plenty up there."

"Now you are an odd Plancine! What did you want with the ghosts of the
dead?"

"I will tell you, you tall man; and you will not abuse my confidence.
George, for all your gay independence, you must allow me a little
family pride and a little pathetic interest in the fortunes of the dead
and gone De Jussacs."

"It is Mademoiselle De Jussac that speaks."

"It is Plancine, who knows so little:--that 'The Terror' would have
guillotined her father, a boy of fourteen: that he escaped to Prussia, to
Belgium, to England; for six years always a wanderer and a fugitive: that
he was wrecked on this dear coast and, penniless, started life anew
here on his little accomplishments: that he made out a meagre existence,
and late in the order of years (he was fifty) married an expatriated
countrywoman, who died--George, my mother died when I was seventeen
months old--and that is where I stop. My good, big father--so lonely, so
poor, and so silent! He tells me little. He speaks scantily of the past.
But he was a Vicomte and is the last of his line; and I wanted the ghosts
to explain to me so much that I have never learned."

The moonlight fell upon her sweet, pale, uplifted face. There were tears
in he