“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 bosom and looked frightened.  The child was precious to her.  She had paid a higher price than most women, and that perhaps enhanced its value.

At Fecamp a rusty ramshackle diligence awaited them.  Their luggage, together with hen-coops, baskets, bundles, packing-cases, were piled on top in an amorphous heap.  They took their places inside together with an old priest and a peasant woman in a great flapping cap.  The old priest absorbed snuff in great quantities and used a red handkerchief.  The closed windows of the vehicle rattled, it was very hot, and the antiquated cushions smelled abominably.  Emmy, tired of the