iday, Mr. Jaggs. By the way, what am I to pay
you?"

"The gentleman pays me, miss," said Mr. Jaggs with a sniff. "The lawyer
gentleman."

"Well, he must continue paying you whilst I am away," said the girl. "I
am very grateful to you and I want to give you a little present before
I go. Is there anything you would like, Mr. Jaggs?"

Mr. Jaggs rubbed his beard, scratched his head and thought he would like
a pipe.

"Though bless you, miss, I don't want any present."

"You shall have the best pipe I can buy," said the girl. "It seems very
inadequate."

"I'd rather have a briar, miss," said old Jaggs mistakenly.

He was on duty until the morning she left, and although she rose early
he had gone. She was disappointed, for she had not given him the
handsome case of pipes she had bought, and she wanted to thank him. She
felt she had acted rather meanly towards him. She owed her life to him
twice.

"Didn't you see him go?" she asked Mrs. Morgan.

"No, miss," the stout housekeeper shook her head. "I was up at six and
he'd gone then, but he'd left his chair in the passage--I've got an idea
that's where he slept, miss, if he slept at all."

"Poor old man," said the girl gently. "I haven't been very kind to him,
have I? And I do owe him such a lot."

"Maybe he'll turn up again," said Mrs. Morgan hopefully. She had the
mother feeling for the old, which is one of the beauties of her class,
and she regretted Lydia's absence probably as much because it would
entail the disappearance of old Jaggs as for the loss of her mistress.
But old Jaggs did not turn up. Lydia hoped to see him at the station,
hovering on the outskirts of the crowd in his furtive way, but she was
disappointed.

She left by the eleven o'clock train, joining Mrs. Cole-Mortimer on the
station. That lady had arranged to spend a day in Paris, and the girl
was not sorry, after a somewhat bad crossing of the English Channel,
that she had not to continue her journey through the night.

The South of France was to be a revelation to her. She had no conception
of the extraordinary change of climate and vegetation that could be
experienced in one country.

She passed from a drizzly, bedraggled Paris into a land of sunshine and
gentle breezes; from the bare sullen lands of the Champagne, into a
country where flowers grew by the side of the railway, and that in
February; to a semi-tropic land, fragrant with flowers, to white beaches
by a blue, lazy sea and a sky