drooping in unison with their owner--down the swaying cabin staircase
and deposited her on a couch.

"Oh! I do wish I hadn't eaten that fruit," she groaned when I offered
her smelling-salts. "But then, you know, I was so hungry!"

In the _train rapide_ a little later, Placidia, when arranging her wraps
for the night journey, chanced, among the medley of her belongings, upon
a missing boat-ticket whose absence at the proper time had threatened
complications. She burst into good-humoured laughter at the discovery.
"Why, here's the ticket that man made all the fuss about. I really
thought he wasn't going to let me land till I found it. Now, I do wonder
how it got among my rugs?"

We seemed to be awake all night, staring with wide, unseeing eyes out
into the darkness. Yet the chill before dawn found us blinking sleepily
at a blue-bloused porter who, throwing open the carriage door, curtly
announced that we were in Paris.

Then followed a fruitless search for Placidia's luggage, a hunt which
was closed by Placidia recovering her registration ticket (with a
fragment of candy adhering to it) from one of the multifarious pockets
of her ulster, and finding that the luggage had been registered on to
Marseilles. "Will they charge duty on tobacco?" she inquired blandly, as
she watched the Customs examination of our things. "I've such a lot of
cigars in my boxes."

There was an Old-Man-of-the-Sea-like tenacity in Placidia's smiling
impuissance. She did not know one syllable of French. A new-born babe
could not have revealed itself more utterly incompetent. I verily