ic beautiful enough for paradise was
filling the perfumed air.

"For those who care nothing for gambling, that music is one of the
baits," said Lloyd. "When you really love music, it is very hard to keep
away from it; and here, where there is no other music to compete with
it, it is offered to you in its divinest perfection, at an agreeable
distance from Nice and Mentone, along one of the most beautiful
driveways in the world, with a Parisian hotel at its best to give you,
besides, what other refreshment you need. Hundreds of persons come here
sincerely 'only to hear the music.' But few go away without 'one look'
at the gambling tables; and it is upon that 'one look' that the
proprietors of the Casino, knowing human nature, quietly and securely
rely."

The Professor, having seen it all, had no words to express his feeling,
but walked across to call the carriages with the air of a man who shook
off perdition from every finger. And yet I felt sure, from what I knew
of him, that he had appreciated the attractions of the place less than
any one of us--had not, in fact, been reached by them at all. Those who
do not feel the allurements of a temptation are not tempted. Not a grain
in the Professor's composition responded to the invitation of the siren
Chance; they were not allurements to him; they were but the fantastic
phantasmagoria of a dream. The lovely garden he appreciated only
botanically; the view he could not see; abstemious by nature, he cared
nothing for the choice rarities of the hotel; while the music, the
heavenly music, was to him no more than the housewife's clatter of tin
pans. Yet I might have explained this to him all the way home, he would
never have comprehended it, but would have gone on thinking that it was
simply, on his part, superior virtue and self-control.

But I had no opportunity to explain, since I was not in the carriage
with him, but with Janet, Inness, and Baker. Margaret and Lloyd drove
homewards together in the phaeton; and as they did not reach the hotel
until dusk--long after our own arrival--I asked Margaret where they had
been.

"We stopped at the cemetery to watch the sunset beside my statue, aunt."

"Why do you care so much for that marble figure?"

"I do not think she is quite marble," answered Margaret, smiling. "When
I look at her, after a while she becomes, in a certain sense,
responsive. To me she is like a dear friend."

Another week passed, and another. And now the blos