with creditable caution. We
crossed the Rhone and completed the eighteen flat miles in little more
than thirty minutes. When we arrived at the end of this time in the
astonishing little town of Arles, halting in a diminutive square with
two great pillars of granite and a superb Corinthian pediment (dating
from Roman occupation) built into the walls of modern houses, Miss
Randolph announced that they would walk about for half an hour and look
at the antiquities. "Half an hour!" I couldn't help echoing; "why, Arles
is one of the most interesting places in France. It is an open-air
museum."

"I know," said she, looking up at me with an odd expression which I
would have given many a bright sovereign for the skill to read. "But
maybe I shall have a chance to see it some other time, and the others
don't care much for antiquities or architecture. We really _must_ hurry
as fast as possible to Cannes."

Now, why--why? What is to happen at Cannes? Is Jimmy's loathly hand in
this? Or--blessed thought!--is all sight-seeing for her, as well as for
me, poisoned by his society? Is she regretting her rash generosity in
promising to carry him to the Riviera (to say nothing of _Lord Lane_!)
and is she panting to rid herself of him? I daren't hope it. But write
me your deduction. Perhaps in your enforced inaction at Davos it may
amuse you to piece together a theory and account for the actions of
certain persons in France, whom possibly you know better than if you had
ever met them.

While the three went off to bolt in one bite such delicate morsels as
the sculptured porch of the cathedral of St. Trophinus and the Roman
theatre I gloomily played Casabianca by the car, Ixion at the wheel, or
what you will. I waited their return before the hotel, and no sooner did
they come back, at the end of their stingy half-hour, than we started,
taking the road across the great plain of La Crau towards Salon.

A most extraordinary region that plain of La Crau. It is as flat as a
pancake, only far away to the north one sees a range of brown, stony
mountains. Formerly it was a forbidding, stony desert, the dumping-place
for every pebble and boulder brought down by the Rhone and the Durance.
But all over the vast wilderness there has been carried out a wonderful
system of irrigation, and now it yields sweet herbage for sheep, while
figs, mulberries, and cypresses are dotted in green oases. The surface
of the land is thickly veined with the beneficent l