THE WHODUNIT COLLECTION: British Murder Mysteries (15 Novels in One Volume). Charles Norris Williamson

even more powerful."

      "I should like to know what it is, so that I might try to come under it, too, if it's beneficent," that ever-lively curiosity of mine prompted me to say.

      "I am inclined to think it is not beneficent," he answered, smiling mysteriously. "Anyhow, I'm not going to tell you what it is."

      "You never do tell me anything about yourself," I exclaimed crossly, "whereas I've given you my whole history, almost from the day I cut my first tooth, up to that when I—adopted my first brother."

      "Or had him thrust upon you," he amended. "You see, you've nothing to reproach yourself with in your past, so you can talk of it without bitterness. I can't—yet. Only to think of some things makes me feel venomous, and though I really believe I'm improving in the sunbath of your example, which I have every day, the cure isn't complete yet. Until I am able to talk of a certain person without wanting to sprinkle my conversation with curses, I mean to be silent. But I owe it to you that I don't want to curse her any more. A short time ago it gave me actual pleasure."

      So it is to a woman he owes his misfortunes! As Alice said in Wonderland, it grows "mysteriouser and mysteriouser." Also it grows more romantic, when one puts two and two together; and I have always been great at that. The "sentimental association" of the battlement garden plus the inspiration to evil language, equal (in my fancy) one fair, faithless lady, once loved, now hated. I hate her, too, whatever she did, and I should like to box her ears. I hope she's quite old, and married, and that she makes up her complexion, and everything else which causes men to tire of their first loves sooner or later. Not that it is anything to me, personally; but one owes a little loyalty to one's friends.

      The porch and cloisters of St. Trophime's were too perfectly beautiful to be marred by a mood; but my brother Jack's mysteriously wicked sweetheart would keep coming in between me and the wonderful carvings in the most disturbing way. Some women never know when they are wanted! But I did my best to make Mr. Dane forget her by taking an intelligent interest in everything, especially the things he cared for most, though once, in an absent-minded instant, I did unfortunately say: "I don't admire that type of girl," when we were talking about a sculptured saint; and although he looked surprised I thought it too complicated to try and explain.

      The afternoon light was burnishing the ancient stone carvings to copper when we left the cloisters of St. Trophime, took one last look at the porch, and turned toward the amphitheatre. We were right to have waited, for the vast circle was golden in the sunset, like a heavy bracelet, dropped by Atlas one day, when he stretched a weary arm; and the beautiful fragments of coloured marbles, which the Greeks loved and Christians destroyed, were the jewels of that great bracelet. The place was so pathetically beautiful in the dying day that a soft sadness pressed upon me like a hand on my forehead, and echoes of the long-dead past, when Greek Arles was a harbour of commerce by sea and river, or when it was Roman Arelate, rich and cruel, rang in my ears as we wandered through the cells of prisoners, the dens of lions, and the rooms of gladiators, where the young "men about town" used to pat their favourites on oiled backs, or make their bets on ivory tablets.

      "If we were here by moonlight, we should see ghosts," I said. "Come, let us go before it grows any darker or sadder. The shadows seem to move. I think there's a lion crouching in that black corner."

      "He won't hurt you, sister Una," said my brother Jack. "There's one thing you must see here before I take you home—back to the hotel, I mean; and that is the Saracen Tower, as they call it."

      So we went into the Saracen Tower, and high up on the wall I saw the presentment of a hand.

      "That is the Hand of Fatima," explained the guide, who had been following rather than conducting us, because the chauffeur knew almost as much about the amphitheatre as he did. "You should touch it, mademoiselle, for luck. All the young ladies like to do that here; and the young men also, for that matter."

      Instantly my brother lifted me up, so that I might touch the hand; and then I would not be content unless he touched it too.

      I had dinner in the couriers' room that evening, with my brother, when I had dressed Lady Turnour for hers. We were rather late, and had the room to ourselves, for the crowd which had collected there at luncheon time had vanished by train or motor. There was a nice old waiter, who was frankly interested in us, recognizing perhaps that, as a maid and chauffeur, we were out of the beaten track. He wanted to know if we had done any sight-seeing in Arles, and seemed to take it as a personal compliment that we had.

      "Mademoiselle touched the Hand of Fatima, of course?" he asked, letting a trickle of sauce spill out of a sauce-boat in his friendly eagerness for my answer.

      "Oh, yes, I saw to it that she did that," replied Mr. Dane, with conscious virtue in the achievement.

      "It is for luck, isn't it?" I said, to make conversation.

      "And more especially for love," came the unexpected answer.

      "For love!" I exclaimed.

      "But yes," chuckled the old man. "If a young girl puts her hand on the Hand of Fatima at Arles, that hand puts love into hers. Her fate is sealed within the month, so it is said."

      "Nonsense!" remarked Mr. Dane, "I never heard that silly story before." And he went on eating his dinner with extraordinary nonchalance and an unusual, almost abnormal, appetite.

      Chapter XIX

       Table of Contents

      I shall always feel that I dreamed Aigues Mortes: that I fell asleep at night—oh, but fell very far, so much farther than one usually falls even when one wakes with the sensation of dropping from a great height, that I went bumping down, down from century to century, until I touched earth in a strange, drear land, to find I had gone back in time about seven hundred years.

      Not that there is a conspicuous amount either of land or earth at Aigues Mortes, City of Dead Waters—if the place really does exist, which I begin to doubt already; but I have only to shut my eyes to call it up; and in my memory I shall often use it as a background for some mediæval picture painted with my mind. For with my mind I can rival Raphael. It is only when I try to execute my fancies that I fail, and then they "all come different," which is heart breaking. But it will be something to have the background always ready.

      The dream did not begin while we spun gaily from Arles to Aigues Mortes, through pleasant if sometimes puerile-seeming country (puerile only because we hadn't its history dropping from our fingers' ends); but there was time, between coming in sight of the huge, gray-brown towers and driving in through the fortified gateway, for me to take that great leap from the present far down into the past.

      To my own surprise, I didn't want to think of the motor-car. It had brought us to older places, but within this walled quadrangle it was as if we had come full tilt into a picture; and the automobile was not an artistic touch. Ingrate that I was, I turned my back upon the Aigle, and was thankful when Sir Samuel and Lady Turnour walked out of my sight around the corner of the picture. I pretended, when they had disappeared, that I had painted them out, and that they would cease to exist unless I relented and painted them in again, as eventually I should have to do. But I had no wish to paint the driver of the car out of my picture, for in spite of his chauffeur's dress he is of a type which suits any century, any country—that clear-cut, slightly stern, aquiline type which you find alike on Roman coins and in modern drawing-rooms. He would have done very well for one of St. Louis's crusaders, waiting here at Aigues Mortes to sail for Palestine with his king, from the sole harbour the monarch could claim as his on all the Mediterranean coast. I decided to let him remain in the dream picture, therefore, and told him so, which seemed to please him, for his eyes lighted up. He always understands exactly what I mean when I say odd things. I should never have felt quite the same to him again, I think, if he had stared and asked "What dream picture?"

      I had been brought on this expedition strictly for use, not for ornament. We were going from Aigues Mortes to St. Gilles and from St. Gilles