deaux tapped at Clara's door that evening after they reached
home.

"I came to tell you that I shall leave London early in the morning,"
she said.

"You will not wait to see George and his wife?"

"I hope I never shall see them again. No! Not a word! I will hear no
arguments!" She came into the room and closed the door. There was a
certain novel air of decision and youth in her figure and movements.
"I am going to make a change, Clara," she said. "I have worked for
others long enough. I am going away now, alone. I will be free. I
will live my own life--at last." Her eyes shone with exultation.

"And---- Where are you going?" stammered Miss Vance, dismayed.

"I don't know. There is so much--it has all been waiting so long for
me. There are the cathedrals--and the mountains. Or the Holy Land.
Perhaps I may try to write again. There seems to be a dumb word or two
in me. Don't be angry with me, Clara," throwing her arms about her
cousin, the tears rushing to her eyes. "I may come back to you and
little Lucy some time. But just now I want to be alone and fancy
myself young. I never was young."

When Lucy stole into her old friend's chamber the next morning as usual
to drink her cup of coffee with her, she found the door open and the
room in disorder, and she was told that Mrs. Waldeaux had left London
at daybreak.

CHAPTER VII

During the year which followed, Mr. Perry was forced to return to the
States, but he made two flying trips across "the pond," as he called
it, in the interests of his magazine, always running down his prey of
notorieties in that quarter of Europe in which Miss Vance and her
charges chanced to be.

When he came in July he found them in a humble little inn in Bozen. He
looked with contempt at the stone floors, the clean cell-like chambers,
each with its narrow bed, and blue stone ewer perched on a wooden
stool; and he sniffed with disgust when breakfast was served on a table
set out in the Platz.

"Don't know," he said, "whether I can digest food, eating out of doors.
Myself, I never give in to these foreign ways. It's time they learned
manners from us."

"I have no doubt," said Miss Vance placidly, "that you can find one of
the usual hotels built for rich Americans in the town. We avoid them.
We search out the inns du pays to see as far behind the scenes as we
can. I don't care to go to those huge houses with mobs of Chicagoans
and New Yorkers; and have the c