And yet on the morrow he found himself, and not without a certain relief, sitting beside the mundane, little lady, and turning to her incessant ripple of speech something of the philosophic indifference to which her husband had attained, while a sturdy pair of gaily-caparisoned horses, whose bells made a constant accompaniment, not unpleasing in its preciseness, to the vagueness of Rainham’s thought, hurried them over the dusty surface of the Cornice.

Certainly the excursion into which he had been inveigled, rather from indolence than from any freak of his inclination, afforded him, now that it was undertaken, a certain desultory pleasure to which he had long been a stranger.  Into the little shrug, comic and valedictory, of Mrs. Dollond’s shoulders, as they passed the Octroi, a gesture discreetly mocking of the conditions they had left, he could enter with some humour, the appreciation of a resident who still permitted himself at times the licence of a casual visitor on his domain.

“Tell me,” Mrs. Dollond had asked, as they rattled out of the further gate of Ventimiglia, “why did the excellent lady who tried to monopolize conversation in the salon last night appear so scandalized when I told her where we were going?  Was I—­surely now, Mr. Rainham, I was not indiscreet?”

“Ah, Mrs. Dollond,” said Rainham humorously, “you know it was a delicate subject.  At our hotel we don’t recognise Monte Carlo.  We are divided upon the other topics in which we are interested:  the intrigues of the lawn tennis club, and the orthodoxy of the English chaplain.  But we are all orthodox about Monte Carlo, and Mrs. Engel is the pillar of our faith.  We think it’s——­”

“The devil?” interrupted Mr. Dollond, bending forward a little, with his bland smile.

“Precisely,” said Rainham; “that is what Mrs. Engel would say.  Oh no, Mrs. Dollond, we don’t drive over to Monte Carlo from Bordighera.  At Mentone it is more regular; you see, you can get there from Mentone pretty much by accident.  But from Bordighera it has too much the appearance of being a preconcerted thing.”

“It was particularly preconcerted here,” put in the Academician with a yawn, and Mrs. Dollond remarked innocently that people who wintered in these places must have very singular ideas.

The prospect was increasing in beauty as they wound their way along the historical road, now rendered obscure by the thick groves of olives on either side, now varied by little glimpses of the sea, which again they skirted from time to time, and so nearly that, as Mrs. Dollond remarked, it was like driving along the sands.  Rainham identified spots for them as the prospect widened, naming sea-girt Mortola with its snug chateau, Mentone lying placidly with its two bays in the westering sun, and, now and again, notorious peaks of the Alpes Maritimes which bounded the horizon beyond.  At the frontier bridge of St. Louis, where they alighted to meet the requirements of the