Octavia came up and caught her arm, with a quick, apprehensive demand for her meaning. Briefly and tenderly, as well as she could, Josephine imparted everything.

Octavia took the blurred letter, and glanced at it for an instant; then sank into a chair, gazing wanly at the woman who stood motionless opposite her. She shrank, and seemed to wither visibly.

"O God, O God!" she cried. "I have killed him. And how I am punished! That it should be my letter brought back to me, and that you, Josephine, should be the one to bring it!"

A heart-broken moan buried anything further that she might have been moved to say, and the tears streamed from beneath her eyelids.

Oliphant was interred at Woodlawn, beside little Effie; and Octavia, without vehemence, but resolutely, and setting aside every conventional consideration, took her share in all the final dispositions. With Justin she went to place the flowers around him in his coffin, and looked once more upon her hapless lover. His face was not like that of a dead man; it was that of one who had been awakened and told that he might depart from imprisonment. True, the sinister and perhaps ironical change which comes over the countenances of those who are to open their lips no more on earth had fallen upon it. But through the baffling dumbness of its slightly pinched lines that peculiar silence that seemed to be voluntary, like a mask put on in order that the wearer might conceal some intelligence too important to be betrayed by a lookthere stole a far-off, wonderful, calm light of exalted joy.

What had he last thought of, as he passed away? She imagined the noble scorn that must have swept through every vein and nerve, when he measured the monstrous selfishness of old Thorburn, and instantly threw into the balance against it his own sacrifice. The

final consciousness in his mind must have been one of absolute, magnanimous love; not for her, nor for any one individual, but a sentiment so large and ideal that it made the laying down of his life for a woman he had never seen before, and for her little child, a pleasure surpassing any other. Whether that woman was valuable in herself or not, she came before him in that tragic hour as a type of motherhood, she presented to him an image of life in its most sacred form; and the love in his heart went out towards it with perfect purity and power.

Such were the broken meditations that came to Octavia, while she arranged the flowers. She performed the task without flinching; yet a few irrepressible tears fell softly upon her hands, and the hands trembled slightly, like leaves wet with dew, just stirring in the breath of daybreak.

A year later, Octavia was again at Newport for a few days, soon after the season began. The place was still beautiful to her, and she remembered her old enthusiasm for it; but the spectacle of its life no longer held any charm. And yet how short a time since she had been a part of it! Was it out of that vanity and frivolity that her own folly had arisen, which led her to jest maliciously with Oliphant's love?

Once while she was there, she saw Josephine and Perry Thorburn driving together, and was conscious in a dreamy way of the fact, which had been imparted to her, that they were engaged; but she had no meeting with them. Much more important and distinct to her mind was a long, kind letter which she received from Vivian Craig, written in Germany, whither Justin had gone after Oliphant's legacy was made over to him.

"I am wearing your diamonds that you gave me for a wedding present," said Vivian in her letter, "and baby has been crying for them. Just as I

write, though, she is laughing again at their pretty sparkle."

So, in the quick round of life, the widow's tears had become the moment's plaything of a child, and a rainbow coloring flashed from them.

The last day that Octavia spent in Newport, she went out on foot, and walked over the bleak downs where Oliphant had wandered on that dreary day of his defeat. She arrived at the great house near the cave; but the place was closed and empty now, and she could go down to the rocks without intrusion. For a long while she sat lost in thought upon the lonely little ledge on which, when she last visited it, Oliphant had sat with her. It was very silent there; the waters hardly murmured in the cave: no one was near. What an immense solitude surrounded her! And how much greater was the solitude of her own heart! Yet she felt a presence attending her the soft breeze, that crept up to her and tenderly played with a tress or two of straying hair upon her forehead, was like Oliphant's hand caressing her. The slumbering ocean, too, which had absorbed his life, seemed conscious of him.

But had he not once loved another woman, and she another man? Which was the true love? She could not un

ravel the knot; but at least she knew that, whatever the limitations of one heart or of individual devotion, the great ideal passion survived through all these changes. Oliphant had brought something of rare worth into her life; had given her a higher conception of love. To this extent she shared in it, that it had touched her in passing, and that she now knew its quality. Though she had failed to grasp and keep it, the power and the fragrance remained with her still, like the lingering, lifting odor of the sea blown in at random through an artificial atmosphere.

Love had come, and love had gone. How strange that it had not stayed with Oliphant, who so well deserved to have it! How strange that he should have chosen to follow her, instead of Josephine; and that Josephine's passion for him should have been so blindly frustrated! Octavia herself was also left alone. And yet, though love had thus come and gone, it was somehow here at last.

Octavia rose from the ledge to walk back she was about to leave Newport forever. As she stood for a moment there, her small, fine figure was relieved against the gray bastion of rock like a silhouette.

She was clad wholly in black-black never more to be abandoned.

George Parsons Lathrop.

A. A. Dayton.

VI.

THE COUNTRY OF ARLES.

I.

On my way from Nîmes to Arles, I spent three hours at Tarascon; chiefly for the love of Alphonse Daudet, who has written nothing more genial than the Aventures Prodigieuses de Tartarin, and the story of the "siege" of the bright, dead little town (a mythic siege by the Prussians) in the Contes du Lundi. In the introduction which, for the new edition of his works, he has lately supplied to Tartarin, the author of this extravagant but kindly satire gives some account of the displeasure with which he has been visited by the ticklish Tarasconnais. Daudet relates that in his attempt to shed a humorous light upon some of the more erratic phases of the Provençal character he selected Tarascon at a venture; not because the temperament of its natives is more vainglorious than that of their neighbors, or their rebellion against the "despotism of fact" more marked, but simply because he had to name a particular Provençal city. Tartarin is a hunter of lions and charmer of women, a true "produit du midi," as Daudet says, who has the most fantastic and fabulous adventures. He is a minimized Don Quixote, with much less dignity, but with equal good faith, and the story of his exploits is a little masterpiece of the light comical. The Tarasconnais, however, declined to take the joke, and opened the vials of their wrath upon the mocking child of Nîmes, who would have been better employed, they doubtless thought, in showing up the infirmities of his own family. I am bound to add that when I passed through Tarascon they did not appear to be in the NO. 316.

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least out of humor. Nothing could have been brighter, softer, more suggestive of amiable indifference, than the picture it presented to my mind. It lies quietly beside the Rhone, looking across at Beaucaire, which seems very distant and independent, and tacitly consenting to let the castle of the good King René of Anjou, which projects very boldly into the river, pass for its most interesting feature. The other features are, primarily, a sort of vivid sleepiness in the aspect of the place, as if the September noon (it had lingered on into October) lasted longer there than elsewhere; certain low arcades, which make the streets look gray, and exhibit empty vistas; and a very curious and beautiful walk beside the Rhone, denominated the Chaussée, a long and narrow causeway, densely shaded by two rows of magnificent old trees, planted in its embankment, and rendered doubly effective, at the moment I passed over it, by a little train of collegians, who had been taken out for mild exercise by a pair of young priests. Lastly, one may say that a striking element of Tarascon, as of any town that lies on the Rhone, is simply the Rhone itself: the big brown flood, of uncertain temper, which has never taken time to forget that it is a child of the mountain and the glacier, and that such an origin carries with it great privileges. Later, at Avignon, I observed it in the exercise of these privileges, chief among which was "that of frightening the good people of the old papal city half out of their wits."

The château of King René serves today as the prison of a district, and the traveler who wishes to look into it must obtain his permission at the Mairie of Tarascon. If he has had a certain experience of French manners, his application will be accompanied with the

forms of a considerable obsequiosity, and in this case his request will be granted as civilly as it has been made. The castle has more of the air of a severely feudal fortress than I should suppose the period of its construction (the first half of the fifteenth century) would have warranted; being tremendously bare and perpendicular, and constructed for comfort only in the sense that it was arranged for defense. It is a square and simple mass, composed of small yellow stones, and perched on a pedestal of rock which easily commands the river. The building has the usual circular towers at the corners, and a heavy cornice at the top, and immense stretches of sun-scorched wall, relieved at wide intervals by small windows, heavily crossbarred. It has above all an extreme steepness of aspect; I cannot express it otherwise. The walls are as sheer and inhospitable as precipices. The castle has kept its large moat, which is now a hollow filled with wild plants. To this tall fortress the good René retired in the middle of the fifteenth century, finding it apparently the most substantial thing left him in a dominion which had included Naples and Sicily, Lorraine and Anjou. He had been a much-tried monarch and the sport of a various fortune, fighting half his life for thrones he did n't care for, and exalted only to be quickly cast down. Provence was the country of his affection, and the memory of his troubles did not prevent him from holding a joyous court at Tarascon and at Aix. He finished the castle at Tarascon, which had been begun earlier in the century,-finished it, I suppose, for consistency's sake, in the manner in which it had originally been designed rather than in accordance with the artistic tastes that formed the consolation of his old age. He was a painter, a writer, a dramatist, a modern dilettante, addicted to private theatricals. There is something very attractive in the image that he has imprinted on the

page of history. He was both clever and kind, and many reverses and much suffering had not embittered him nor quenched his faculty of enjoyment. He was fond of his sweet Provence, and his sweet Provence has been grateful; it has woven a light tissue of legend around the memory of the good King René.

I strolled over his dusky habitation -it must have taken all his good-humor to light it up at the heels of the custodian, who showed me the usual number of castle properties: a deep, well-like court, a collection of winding staircases and vaulted chambers, the embrasures of whose windows and the recesses of whose doorways reveal a tremendous thickness of wall. These things constitute the general identity of old castles, and when one has wandered through a good many, with due discretion of step and protrusion of head, one ceases very much to distinguish and remember, and contents one's self with consigning them to the honorable limbo of the romantic. I must add that this reflection did not in the least deter me from crossing the bridge which connects Tarascon with Beaucajre, in order to examine the old fortress whose ruins adorn the latter city. It stands on a foundation of rock much higher than that of Tarascon, and looks over with a melancholy expression at its better-conditioned brother. Its position is magnificent, and its outline very gallant. I was well rewarded for my pilgrimage; for if the castle of Beaucaire is only a fragment, the whole place, with its position and its views, is an ineffaceable picture. It was the stronghold of the Montmorencys, and its last tenant was that rash Duke François, whom Richelieu, seizing every occasion to trample on a great noble, caused to be beheaded at Toulouse, where we saw, in the Capitol, the butcher's knife with which the cardinal pruned the crown of France of its thorns. The castle, after the death of this victim, was virtually demolished. Its site, which

Α

Nature to-day has taken again to herself, has an extraordinary charm. The mass of rock that it formerly covered rises high above the town, and is as precipitous as the side of the Rhone. tall, rusty iron gate admits you from a quiet corner of Beaucaire to a wild, tangled garden, covering the side of the hill for the whole place forms the public promenade of the townsfolk — a garden without flowers, with little steep, rough paths that wind under a plantation of small, scrubby stone-pines. Above this is the grassy platform of the castle, inclosed on one side only (toward the river) by a large fragment of wall and a very massive dungeon. There are benches placed in the lee of the wall, and others on the edge of the platform, where one may enjoy a view, beyond the river, of certain peeled and scorched undulations. A sweet desolation, an everlasting peace, seemed to hang in the air. A very old man, a fragment, like the castle itself, emerged from some crumbling corner to do me the honors

a

very gentle, obsequious, tottering, toothless, grateful old man. He beguiled me into an ascent of the solitary tower, from which you may look down on the big sallow river and glance at diminished Tarascon, and the barefaced, baldheaded hills behind it. It may appear that I insist too much upon the nudity of the Provençal horizon-too much, considering that I have spoken of the prospect from the heights of Beaucaire as lovely. But it is an exquisite bareness; it seems to exist for the purpose of allowing us to follow the delicate lines of the hills, and touch with the eyes, as it were, the smallest inflections of the landscape. It makes the whole thing seem wonderfully bright and pure.

Beaucaire used to be the scene of a famous fair, the great fair of the south of France. It has gone the way of most fairs, even in France, where these delightful exhibitions hold their own much better than might be supposed.

It is still held in the month of July; but the bourgeoises of Tarascon send to the Magasin du Louvre for their smart dresses, and the principal glory of the scene is its long tradition. Even now, however, it ought to be the prettiest of all fairs, for it takes place in a charming wood which lies just beneath the castle, beside the Rhone. The booths, the barracks, the platforms of the mountebanks, the bright-colored crowd, diffused through this midsummer shade, and spotted here and there with the rich Provençal sunshine, must be of the most pictorial effect. It is highly probable, too, that it offers a large collection of pretty faces; for even in the few hours that I spent at Tarascon I discovered symptoms of the purity of feature for which the women of the pays d'Arles are renowned. The Arlesian head-dress was visible in the streets, and this delightful coiffure is so associated with a charming facial oval, a dark, mild eye, a straight Greek nose, and a mouth worthy of all the rest that it conveys a presumption of beauty which gives the wearer time either to escape or to please you. I have read somewhere, however, that Tarascon is supposed to produce handsome men, as Arles is known to deal in handsome women. It may be that I should have found the Tarasconnais a race of Apollos, if I had encountered enough specimens to justify an induction. But there were very few males in the streets, and the place presented no appearance of activity.

Here and there the black coif of an old woman or of a young girl was framed by a low doorway; but for the rest, as I have said, Tarascon was mostly involved in a siesta. There was not a creature in the little church of Saint Martha, which I made a point of visiting before I returned to the station, and which, with its fine Romanesque sideportal and its pointed and crocketed Gothic spire, is as curious as it need be, in view of its tradition. It stands in a