state
and personal ambition. To-day, it is still the resort of Nimes where
everyone meets everyone else, either by design or by the chance
intercourse of a small town.

On a morning of _mistral_, Riviere was seated in the pleasant warmth of
the Jardin, planning out a special piece of apparatus for his coming
research-work. He was concentrating intently--so intently that he did
not notice Miss Verney passing him with a very professional-looking
campstool, easel and sketch-book.

This second encounter was pure accident. Elaine had no intentions
whatever of following the man who had left Arles with such boorish
brusqueness, without even the conventional good-bye at the
breakfast-table. She had come to Nimes because she was a worker, because
this town contained special material necessary to her bread-winning.

She had guessed that Riviere's hurried departure from Arles was made in
order to avoid meeting her. It hurt. Woman-like, she set more value on a
few pleasant words of farewell over a breakfast-table and a warm
handshake than on a defence from assault at the risk of a man's life.
The seeming illogicality of woman is of course a mere surface illusion.
It hides a train of reasoning very different to a man's. It is a mental
short-cut like an Irishman's "bull," which condenses a whole chain of
thought into a single link.

In this case Elaine knew that Riviere's rescue held no personal
significance. He did not know at the time that it was _she_ who was
being attacked. He would have gone to the defence of any woman under
similar circumstances. While altruism appealed to her strongly in a
broad, general way, it did not appeal when it came home in such a
specific, individual fashion.

On the other hand, a warm handshake at the breakfast-table would have
its personal significance. It would be a homage to herself, and not to
women in general. Its value would lie in its personal meaning.

While she knew this thought was ungenerous, yet at the same time she
knew that behind it there lay a sound basis of reason.

Her pride--that form of pride which is a very wholesome
self-respect--made her flush at the thought that Riviere would see her
and imagine, in a man's way, that she had followed him to Nimes. She
hurried on past him with a rapid side-glance. The situation was an
awkward one. She had her work to do by the old Roman baths and the
Druid's Tower on the hillside, and she could not leave Nimes without
doing it.

When