ter consultation of a guide to Normandy, on which Emmy's prudence
insisted, they found the brave sailor's facts mainly correct, and decided
on Hottetot-sur-Mer.

"I will take you there, see that you are comfortably settled, and then come
back to Paris," said Septimus. "You'll be quite happy with Madame Bolivard,
won't you?"

"Of course," said Emmy, looking away from him. "What are you going to do in
Paris, all by yourself?"

"Guns," he replied. Then he added reflectively: "I also don't see how I
can get out of the Hotel Godet. I've been there some time, and I don't know
how much to give the servants in tips. The only thing is to stay on."

Emmy sighed, just a bit wistfully, and made no attempt to prove the
futility of his last argument. The wonderfully sweet of life had come to
her of late mingled with the unutterably bitter. She was in the state of
being when a woman accepts, without question. Septimus then went to the St.
Lazare station to make arrangements and discovered an official who knew a
surprising amount about railway traveling and the means of bringing a
family from domicile to station. He entered Septimus's requirements in a
book and assured him that at the appointed hour an omnibus would be waiting
outside the house in the Boulevard Raspail. Septimus thought him a person
of marvelous intellect and gave him five francs.

So the quaint quartette started in comfort: Septimus and Emmy and Madame
Bolivard and the little lump of mortality which the Frenchwoman carried in
her great motherly arms. Madame Bolivard, who had not been out of Paris for
twenty years, needed all her maternal instincts to subdue her excitement at
the prospect of seeing the open country and the sea. In the railway
carriage she pointed out cattle to the unconscious infant with the
tremulous quiver of the traveler who espies a herd of hippogriffin.

"Is it corn that, Monsieur? _Mon Dieu_, it is beautiful. Regard then the
corn, my cherished one."

But the cherished one cared not for corn or cattle. He preferred to fix his
cold eyes on Septimus, as if wondering what he was doing in that galley.
Now and again Septimus would bend forward and, with a vague notion of the
way to convey one's polite intentions to babies, would prod him gingerly in
the cheek and utter an insane noise and then surreptitiously wipe his
finger on his trousers. When his mother took him she had little spasms of
tenderness during which she pressed him tightly to her b