wn, put his lips to the damp brow, and
feeling him move, said very gravely and respectfully, as one speaks to
the head of the family, "Good-night, my brother." Perhaps the captive
soul had heard it from the depths of its dark and abject limbo. For the
lips moved and a long moan answered him, a far-away wail, a despairing
cry, which filled with helpless tears the glance exchanged between
Francoise and her son, and tore from them both the same cry in which
their sorrow met, "Pecaire," the local word which expressed all pity and
all tenderness.

The next day, from early morning, the commotion began with the arrival
of the actors, an avalanche of hats and wigs and big boots, of short
skirts and affected cries, of floating veils and fresh make-ups. The
women were in a great majority, as Cardailhac thought that for a Bey
the play was of little consequence, and that all that was needful was to
have catchy tunes in pretty mouths, to show fine arms and shapely legs
in the easy costume of light opera. All the well-made celebrities of his
theatre were there, Amy Ferat at the head of them, a bold young woman
who had already had her teeth in the gold of several crowns. There
were two or three well-known men whose pale faces made the same kind of
chalky and spectral spots amid the green of the trees as the plaster of
the statues. All these people, enlivened by the journey, the surprise of
the country, the overflowing hospitality, as well as the hope of making
something out of this sojourn of Beys and Nabobs and other gilded fools,
wanted only to play, to jest and sing with the vulgar boisterousness
of a crew of freshly discharged Seine boatmen. But Cardailhac meant
otherwise. No sooner were they unpacked, freshened up, and luncheon over
than, quick, the parts, the rehearsals! There was no time to lose. They
worked in the small drawing-room next the summer gallery, where the
theatre was already being fitted up; and the noise of hammers, the songs
from the burlesque, the shrill voices, the conductor's fiddle, mingled
with the loud trumpet-like calls of the peacocks, and rose upon the hot
southern wind, which, not recognising it as only the mad rattle of its
own grasshoppers, shook it all disdainfully on the trailing tip of its
wings.

Seated in the centre of the terrace, as in the stage-box of his theatre,
Cardailhac watched the rehearsals, gave orders to a crowd of workmen
and gardeners, had trees cut down as spoiling the view, desig