he was saying, "my curiosity has been touched by that very fine
photograph over there. I don't recognize the castle it shows."

"That's in Bayonne," she said, and paused, her eyes speculatively on
him.

"No, Heavens no! You don't need to tell me that it's not Bayonne, New
Jersey!" he answered her unspoken question violently. This made her
laugh, opening her long eyes a little. He went on, "I've been as far as
Pau, but never went into the Basque country."

"Oh, Pau." She said no more than this, but Welles had the impression
that these words somehow had made a comment on Vincent's information.
Vincent seemed to think so too, and curiously enough not to think it a
very favorable comment. He looked, what he almost never looked, a little
nettled, and spoke a little stiffly. "It's a very fine specimen," he
said briefly, looking again at the photograph.

"Oh, it looks very much finer and bigger in the photograph than it
really is," she told them. "It's only a bandbox of a thing compared with
Coucy or Pierrefonds or any of the northern ones. It was built, you
know, like the Cathedral at Bayonne, when the Plantagenets still held
that country, but after they were practically pretty near English, and
both the château and the Gothic cathedral seem queer aliens among the
southern natives. I have the photograph up there on the wall only
because of early associations. I lived opposite it long ago when I was a
little girl."

This, to Mr. Welles, was indistinguishable from the usual talk of people
who have been "abroad." To tell the truth they always sounded to him