their climate--always a bad one--with them, but she had set her mind on
San Remo; and Lanfear was willing to pass a few days in the place making
the observations which he felt pretty sure would be adverse.

His train was rather late, and the sunset was fading from the French sky
beyond the Italian shore when he got out of his car and looked round for
a porter to take his valise. His roving eye lighted on the anxious
figure, which as fully as the anxious face, of a short, stout, elderly
man expressed a sort of distraction, as he stood loaded down with
umbrellas, bags, bundles, and wraps, and seemed unable to arrest the
movements of a tall young girl, with a travelling-shawl trailing from
her arm, who had the effect of escaping from him towards a bench beside
the door of the waiting-room. When she reached it, in spite of his
appeals, she sat down with an absent air, and looked as far withdrawn
from the bustle of the platform and from the snuffling train as if on
some quiet garden seat along with her own thoughts.

In his fat frenzy, which Lanfear felt to be pathetic, the old gentleman
glanced at him, and then abruptly demanded: "Are you an American?"

We knew each other abroad in some mystical way, and Lanfear did not try
to deny the fact.

"Oh, well, then," the stranger said, as if the fact made everything
right, "will you kindly tell my daughter, on that bench by the door
yonder"--he pointed with a bag, and dropped a roll of rugs from under
his arm--"that I'll be with her as soon as I've looked after the trunks?
Tell her not to move till I come. Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, will
you?" He caught the sleeve of a _facchino_ who came wandering by, and
heaped him with his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in the