Whitewash. Ethel Watts Mumford

goodness sake, move on! the smell is positively fetid!" exclaimed a brown young woman of about thirty.

      "Boston, you are a born obstructionist. Get out of my picture, will you? There are horrors enough in it without you."

      Of the four, Victoria Claudel was, perhaps, the most noticeable. As she often said of herself, "she was made up of odds and ends." Her small, well-shaped head was set on a full, strong throat. She had very wide shoulders, a tremendous depth of chest, suggestive of great vitality, feet unusually small, and well-formed hands, unexpectedly large. The face that shone out from the shade of a battered campaign hat showed the same irregularity—a short, straight nose, large, ​oblique gray eyes, and a small, dainty mouth in a strong jaw. The forehead was somewhat high, and from it sprung, variously "cowlicked" and very unruly, a great mass of red-black hair, part of which crowning glory was at that moment attempting a descent upon her shoulders, and hung in a loop besprinkled with helpless hairpins. She was not beautiful, but far more than pretty. Vitality, power, vigorous impatience, and ingrained humor seemed to surround her as an atmosphere rings its planet.

      Victoria put down her camera and distributed a handful of coppers among the pilgrim subjects.

      "Give me change for a franc?" the red-haired Sonia Palintzka begged.

      "Can't do it," Victoria returned. "Change it when you get to the hotel. I believe you are a reincarnation of Judas—I never knew you when you weren't trying to change your thirty pieces of silver."

      Shorty fell over her companions in her haste. "Oh, look! See those peasants with the apple-green sleeves and the blue bodices. Heavens! ​he's going to run them down, and they are so beautiful!"

      The older woman disengaged herself from the tangle of Shorty's skirts. "You are perfectly insane, child; do sit still! You've taken at least four pictures without winding one off."

      The girl gasped, "Oh, I believe you're right! Oh, dear! my beggars will be spoiled."

      "They seemed pretty far gone already," Boston ejaculated.

      Their carriage halted for a moment. A balky horse somewhere in the crowd ahead was determinedly holding back the procession. The crush had moved the Empire chaise alongside a well-appointed, green-bodied brougham, from whose window a slim woman, dressed in mourning, was anxiously leaning.

      "It must be horribly dark inside the lady," murmured Victoria, in an undertone: "see how it pours out of her."

      Sonia nodded, the description was so apt. Great troubled, black eyes lit up the woman's haggard face; bushy brows almost met over the thin, high bred nose; hair so intensely black that the widow's ​cap surmounting it seemed lighter by comparison; even her skin was seared as if by fire, yellow brown as it met the raven locks, like burned parchment. All this darkness seemed to emanate from the eyes—two tunnels of Erebus that led inward to depths incalculable.

      Conscious of scrutiny, the lady raised her head. The anxiety of her face froze to haughty annoyance, and she withdrew from the window abruptly.

      "Snapping turtle!" Shorty remarked.

      Victoria smiled. "Did look that way. See the child with her—she's ill. I suppose they are bringing her to St. Anne."

      A fair-haired girl, dressed in black and thin to emaciation, lay in the other corner of the carriage. Her little feet rested on the lap of a maid who sat opposite, holding a smelling-bottle in one hand. As if in obedience to a command, the servant leaned forward and sharply drew down the green silk window-shade, darting, as she did so, a look of unconcealed scorn at Sonia's unaffectedly interested face.

      "End of Act I.—curtain!" said Victoria.

      ​A sway and jar in the packed roadway announced that at last progress was possible. The interrupted tramp of the march again began. Somewhere in the front a chorus of men's voices intoned the ancient Breton chant of St. Anne. It spread from rank to rank, as fire whips across a prairie, till the whole throng rocked with it—an immense emotional swell.

      Vic's face paled a little, and she shook her shoulders as if to throw off the hysterical contagion of the crowd.

      Sonia looked sympathy. "Grips one right by the throat, doesn't it?"

      There was no more stopping now. The procession in its compact thousands advanced as if lifted bodily. The weary straightened themselves, the sick lifted their heads, the eyes of the dying lit once more.

      "Makes one understand the crusades," Shorty murmured, tearfully.

      The resistless stream poured on to its destination, spreading out as it reached the vast paved square in front of the church, and the green acres before the Scala Santa.

      ​The three great doors of the Basilica, opened wide, could hardly accommodate the crowd that surged toward them. The square reeked with the smell of wax candles and the perfume of incense. Up and down every converging street, and bordering the square itself, hung a deep fringe of booths—literally a fringe, for from every roof depended bunches of blessed tapers of every size and quality, from the simple one-sou candle, a foot in length, to the great decorated "cierge," four feet high and as big around as a hand could grasp. Black and yellow festoons of prayer-beads swung to and fro, rattling as the heads of purchasers displaced them. At every booth brilliantly dressed peasants bargained cannily for medals and "pocket saints."

       The Empire chaise with its modern occupants drew up before the door of the largest inn, facing directly on the place. It was preceded by the green-bodied brougham, from which the maid, assisted by the landlord, was lifting the invalid. The deference with which the party was treated marked them as people of importance, and Vic​toria wisely concealed her impatience till the illustrious wants should be ministered to.

      "We engaged our rooms weeks ago, so we're all right, you know," she said, "and they'll treat us better if we don't fluster them in handling their grandees. Suppose we sit out here at one of the little tables till the coast is clear."

      Settling themselves, they eagerly watched the crowd that wove its brilliant patterns before them.

      "Jolly, isn't it?" Shorty commented. "We are the only rank outsiders. Evidently the great American tourist hasn't found this out yet."

      "Give them time—they will—sooner or later," Miss Bently announced, sadly; "to-morrow there will be more—that man over—there, for instance; he's an Englishman, I'll wager a franc."

      "Done," and Victoria held out her hand. "No Englishman would be so fearfully and wonderfully British."

      "I don't see how we're to find out," said Shorty, wistfully.

      "He's going into the hotel—we'll ask the ​chambermaid what room he has, and look it up on the register."

      "But," objected the Russian, "there won't be what you call a register here, only those miserable little slips you have to make out and hand to the landlord—how old you are and where you were born, and what for, and who filled your teeth and where you think you'll go to when you die—and all sorts of little personalities that might interest the police."

      "That's so," Shorty nodded, gravely. "Never mind, though, we'll find out; there is always somebody who makes it his business to know everybody else's."

      "Very handsome sentence. Did you make it all yourself? " Victoria grinned. "Come in, it's safe now to tackle the hotel, they have disposed of the—the—what's feminine for hidalgo?"

      Their entrance into the inn in their turn brought sorrow. The landlord remembered perfectly the correspondence with the young ladies, but what was he to do? Madame de Vernon-Château-Lamion had just arrived, bringing her little daughter to the good St. Anne. She had re​quired the best rooms—as he said before, what could he do? It was vexatious; but the child was ill, very ill.

      Sonia flushed and drew herself up. It was at such moments that she gave ground for the suspicion current in the artistic circles she frequented, that concealed under her simple incognito was a name as illustrious as the Orloffs' own. "My good man," she articulated, as