urse. Aristide felt faint.

"And there is nothing to be done?"

"Nothing, monsieur. Fifty francs is all that she is worth."

"At any rate," said Aristide, "send the basket to the Hotel de Paris."

He went out of the garage like a man in a dream. At the door he turned
to take a last look at the Pride of his Life. Her stern was towards him,
and all he saw of her was the ironical legend, "Cure your Corns."

At the hotel he found the bench outside occupied chiefly by Jean. One
of the little girls in pigtails was holding him, while Miss Anne
administered the feeding-bottle. Provincial France is the happiest
country in the world--in that you can live your intimate, domestic life
in public, and nobody heeds.

"I hope you've not come to tell Jean to boot and saddle," said Miss
Anne, a smile on her roughly-hewn, comely face.

"Alas!" said Aristide, cheered by the charming spectacle before him. "I
don't know when we can get away. My auto has broken down hopelessly. I
ought to go at once to my firm in Marseilles"--he spoke as if he were a
partner in the Maison Hieropath--"but I don't quite know what to do with
Jean."

"Oh, I'll look after Jean."

"But you said you were leaving for Avignon to-day."

[Illustration: ONE OF THE LITTLE GIRLS IN PIGTAILS WAS HOLDING HIM,
WHILE MISS ANNE ADMINISTERED THE FEEDING-BOTTLE]

She laughed, holding the feeding-bottle. "The Palace of the Popes has
been standing for six centuries, and it will be still standing
to-morrow; whereas Jean----" Here Jean, for some reason known to
himself, grinned wet and wide. "Isn't he the most fascinating thing of
the twentieth century?" she cried, logically inconsequential, like most
of her sex. "You go to Marseilles, M. Pujol."

So Aristide took the train to Marseilles--a half-hour's journey--and in
a quarter of the city resembling a fusion of Jarrow, an unfashionable
part of St. Louis, and a brimstone-manufacturing suburb of Gehenna, he
interviewed the high authorities of the Maison Hieropath. His cajolery
could lead men into diverse lunacies, but it could not induce the
hard-bitten manufacturer of quack remedies to provide a brand-new
automobile for his personal convenience. The old auto had broken down.
The manufacturer shrugged his shoulders. The mystery was that it had
lasted as long as it did. He had expected it to explode the first
day. The idea had originally been that of the junior partner, a
scatter-brained youth whom at tim