stories of the monsters that lurk under the rocks at the Pointe de l'Esquillon and forage right up to the town. One is warned to be on his guard against long tentacles reaching out swiftly and silently. One is told that slipping might mean more than a ducking. Owners of villas on the rocks make light of octopi stories, and, as local boomers are trying to make Théoule a summer resort, it is explained that the octopi never come near the beach. Even if they did, they would not be dangerous there. How could they get a hold on the sand with some tentacles while others were grabbing you?

I have never wanted to see anything quite so badly as I wanted to see an octopus at Théoule. Octopus hunting surpasses gathering four-leaf clovers and fishing as an occupation in which hope eternal plays the principal rôle. gradually abandoned other pursuits and sat smoking on rocks by the half-day. I learned over again painfully the boyhood way of drinking from a brook, and

I

lay face downward on island stones. With the enthusiastic help of my children, I made a dummy stuffed with pine cones, and let him foat at the end of a rope. Never a tentacle, let alone octopus, appeared. I had to rest content with Victor Hugo's stirring picture in The Toilers of the Sea.

A plotting wife encouraged the octopus hunts by taking part in them, and expressing frequently her belief in the imminent appearance of the octopi. She declared that sooner or later my reward would come. She threw off the mask on the 1st of May, when she thought it was time to return to work. She announced to the Artist and me that the octopi had gone over to the African coast to keep cool until next winter, and that we had better all go to Paris to do the same. We were ready. Théoule was still lovely, and the terrace breakfasts had lost none of their charm. But one does not linger indefinitely on the Riviera unless dolce far niente has become the principal thing in life.

C

HARLOTTE EBERLIE, her ardent eyes like blue flowers in sunshine, looked up from her footstool to her mother in the judgment-seat above her. The judgment-seat was merely a chaiselongue of silvery gray wicker, cushioned in a piled fabric of more darkly shimmering gray, but Charlotte had always called it the judgment-seat. It was there that Leila Marsh sat to listen to the children and the servants, to weigh their problems, adjust their feuds, mete out their punishments; on the little stand beside it, even now, the household account-books stood waiting in an orderly pile. Leila was not an indolent woman, despite the chair; but life had taught her to conserve the energy that, unwatched, unconfined, would long since have consumed her along with itself.

"Well, mother?" The girl kept her voice light by a rather apparent effort. Her smile was fixed. The flower-like blue of her eyes darkened and hardened to a bright jewel. "Aren't you going to say, 'Bless you, my children'?"`

Mrs. Marsh accorded the quotation the recognition of a faint smile. "I like your Charlie very much," she conceded; but, obviously, something still interposed between her and the blessing of consent for which her daughter asked. "Good!" cried that young lady with a forced vivacity, designed to cover a certain nervousness. And you like me very much, and you highly approve the holy state of matrimony, so that-'

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"Just a minute, dearest." Leila's hands, white, delicately cared for, yet withal tragic, had the trick which the hands of the resolutely self-contained often have; they sometimes revealed the intensities which her face was schooled not to obtrude upon her world. They did this now; they clasped and unclasped nervously; they fluttered as

VOL CXXXVI.-No. 813-56

they rested along the wicker arms of the chair. "Just a minute, Charlotte. II have never talked to you about your father-your own father."

"No," answered Charlotte, suddenly colorless, carefully negative, expressing neither invitation nor rebuff.

"I think I must talk to you of him now. You-you are like him, very like. And he was not a man to find happiness, or to give it, in marriage.”

"Mother, how immoral of you!" cried the girl, restive under earnestness. "Surely you aren't going over to the theory of the family - is doomed,' or 'the-family - be - damned,' or whatever they call it? Surely you aren't going to counsel me to-er-the sort of life in which my father, presumably, gave and found happiness?"

"No." Leila had always met even the crudest of Charlotte's flippancies without other reprimand than coldly and completely to ignore them. "I am merely trying to say this to you-you must be sure of yourself, very sure. Don't how shall I put it inoffensively? -make any man the victim of your experimentation with love. I suffered bitterly in my youth at your father's hands. And that was not all. He suffered also. Oh yes, he suffered in a thousand ways. He was, of course, bored with the scenes I made him at first. And he had no taste for inflicting pain he hated to hurt me. That is why he preferred to deceive me—”

Charlotte started. In all her twentyone years she had never known that ironic edge, of which her mother's voice was capable, turned homeward, turned upon herself or any intimate association. But it was gone as Leila hurried on.

"He suffered also, even if not so sharply as I. And I have no doubt that his life would have been much happier, much more productive, if he had married a woman either capable of holding. him or capable of bearing with his in

fidelities. Wait a minute, Charlotte-" for in the girl's lifted face interruption was imminent. "Let me finish. I have never talked to you about him before, and I shall not again. But now you are old enough to hear me out; you have a trained mind; you must listen and judge for yourself, make your own decisions. I don't expect temptation to come to you in such varied or or such vulgar forms as it came to Thurston." Charlotte shrank a little. She had never before heard her mother call her father's name. "You are a woman, which is in itself a safeguard, at any rate from the grosser, more promiscuous dangers. And I think I hope with all my heart—your upbringing has not made for selfishness and self-indulgence. But you are Thurston Eberlie's own daughter. You have his eyes, his mouth, his laugh. His avidity for pleasure is in you, his zest for change, and some of his hardnessand some of his charm. Now you understand why I want you to be very sure of yourself before you marry Mr. O'Halloran "

She stopped abruptly. She was looking over her daughter's thick, wavy, chestnut hair, out through the thin net curtains of her windows toward the lake, heaving slow, lead-colored waves, save where there flashed a pool of living steel from the reflection of the afternoon sun pushing strongly through a mass of gray clouds. Her eyes were somber and stormy like the waters of the lake, and shot, too, with a shaft of brilliant light. The girl looked long at the absent, handsome face above her, marked the curious confession of suffering in the white hands outstretched upon the chair. And through her selfish shrinking from the sight of tragedy, her selfish absorption in her own plans, there pierced the thought that she, all unconscious, had been the daily reminder of the poignancies that had darkened those eyes, shaped those hands.

'Mother," she whispered, "how you must have hated me!"

Leila Marsh brought her gaze back from the lake. With a sudden melting of her glance, she seemed to caress the young face uplifted to her in fascination and fear.

"Ah, my dear!" she said. "How I

have loved you!" Then she sprang to her feet. She avoided intensities-she had had her fill of them long, long ago; she wanted no more of them now.

"That's all, Charlotte, dear. I wanted to help you to understand yourself before you made irrevocable vows to that nice boy. For vows are irrevocable, however we seem to smash them-"

"I'm sure of myself," stated Charlotte, briefly, following her mother's example and getting to her feet. "And

I do understand myself better-a little. And you better-a lot."

"That," replied Leila, smiling, "is unnecessary, even_ undesirable. Run along now, dear. I'm going to ring for Miss Kenney to come and go over the books

"And I'm engaged? And you'll break it to Dad? And to the dear public? And Charlie may come down from Quentin for the parental benediction?"

"Yes. Run along, now." With an impulsiveness rare in her relations with her children, she leaned forward and kissed the girl.

Yet, when the straight, pliant, young figure had disappeared, her hand, outstretched toward the bell in the panel beside the door, fell back. She turned, and, walking to the window, looked out across the broad, leafless boulevard to the lake. It was all in sullen shadow again, the sun withdrawn from the leaden welter of waters. With nervous, white hands that gave the lie to the smooth tranquillity of her brow, she caught at the curtain-cord. A shudder shook her.

It was eighteen years since Thurston Eberlie had passed out of her life; eighteen years since she had first known loneliness, anguish, the humiliation of

a

nature weakly clamoring for a love withdrawn, and that fierce purpose which is the human spirit's expression of its instinct to live. În them, too, she had known gratitude, affection, companionship, the warm revival of the capacity for happiness. In them she had dared marriage again, had borne children, had experienced life, full, sweet, orderly even noble, as lives go. Yet, with all that lay between her and that day, how its memory, once admitted, still had power to tear at her heart!