s dressed when she came on
board--!"

Half an hour later the anchor was up, and they were cutting through the
white-crested waves. The girl pointed to a green headland on the left
that rose suddenly and overhung the water like a sentinel on guard.

"I have been watching that all the morning in the distance, and I could
think of nothing but the Winged Victory in the Louvre. You remember
how she stands on a rough-hewn pedestal at the head of the marble
staircase, and she is all alone against a dull red background. And as
one looks one goes back all those centuries, and sees her as she was on
the day the Greeks set her up to celebrate their great sea-victory. It
must have all looked just as it does to-day, those centuries ago in the
Island of Samothrace. There was a strong wind blowing, and the waves
met and raced and leapt together, and the sky was the same wonderful
colour that it is now, and there were wild birds hovering and screaming
round her."

"What will you say to me, when I take you away from all this,--when we
have to go back to Barcelona?"

"But I shall go with you?" The blue eyes were searching his face, and
there was fear as well as a question in them.

"Do you suppose I shall leave you here alone, child?" He hated himself
for the evasive answer.

He turned her thoughts to other things, bidding her talk of those days
they had spent together in Paris. She had named it Paradise, and to
her it had been indeed a place of enchantment, for she saw it for the
first time, and Vladimir was always with her.

She had seen its treasures of art, and abandoned herself to its glamour
with the enthusiasm and the freshness of a child.

She had looked out of place in the artificial atmosphere of the
boulevards, among the gas-lit _cafes_, dazzling shop-windows,
_flaneurs_ and gaily dressed women. A man who wrote poetry, and
starved on what he received for his verses in the Quartier Latin, had
stood beside her for a few moments in the Rue de Rivoli, and had gone
home to his garret inspired to produce some lines in which he compared
her to the delicate narcissus blooms that died so quickly in the flower
sellers' baskets.

Together she and Vladimir had strolled among the wonders of the Louvre,
he critical and unmoved, but indulgent and gratified at her pleasure as
at the pleasure of a child.

Pauline had never been able to express what she felt. She could only
worship dumbly before the changeless unfading be