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Grey hair, thinning but slightly near the temples; grey moustache and beard pointed de bouc ; flowered dressing-gown girdled about a heart as simple as a child’s–this was papa, papa who grubbed over his ordnance surveys while the young folks outside whispered of the stars.

Right beneath them–the latter–a broad gully of the hills went plunging precipitously, all rolled with leaf and flower, to the undercliff of soft blue lias and the very roof ridges of King’s Cobb, whose walls and chimneys, now snowed with light, fretted a scallop of the striding bay that swept the land here like a scythe.

Plancine’s village, a lofty appanage or suburb of this little seaboard town at the hill-foot, seemed rather the parent stock from which the other had emancipated itself. For all down the steep slope that fled from Upper to King’s Cobb was flung a debris of houses that, like the ice-fall of a glacier, would appear to have broken from the main body and gone careering into the valley below.

It was in point of fact, however, but a subordinate hamlet–a hanging garden for the jaded tourist in the dog days, when his soul stifled in the oven of the sea-level cliffs–an eyrie for Plancine, and for George, the earnest painter, a Paradise before the fall.

And now says George, “We have talked all round your confession, and still I wait to give you absolution.”

“I will confess. I read it in one of papa’s books that is called the Talmud.”

“Gracious me! you should be careful. What did you read?”

“That whoever wants to see the souls of the dead–“

“Plancine!”

“–must take finely sifted ashes, and strew them round his bed; and in the morning he will see their foot-tracks, as a cock’s. I did it.”

“You did?”

“Last night, yes. And what a business I had afterwards sweeping them up!”

“And did you see anything?”

“Something–yes–I think so. But it might have been mice. There are plenty up there.”

“Now you are an odd Plancine! What did you want with the ghosts of the dead?”

“I will tell you, you tall man; and you will not abuse my confidence. George, for all your gay independence, you must allow me a little family pride and a little pathetic interest in the fortunes of the dead and gone De Jussacs.”

“It is Mademoiselle De Jussac that speaks.”

“It is Plancine, who knows so little:–that ‘The Terror’ would have guillotined her father, a boy of fourteen: that he escaped to Prussia, to Belgium, to England; for six years always a wanderer and a fugitive: that he was wrecked on this dear coast and, penniless, started life anew here on his little accomplishments: that he made out a meagre existence, and late in the order of years (he was fifty) married an expatriated countrywoman, who died–George, my mother died when I was seventeen months old–and that is where I stop. My good, big father–so lonely, so poor, and so silent! He tells me little. He speaks scantily of the past. But he was a Vicomte and is the last of his line; and I wanted the ghosts to explain to me so much that I have never learned.”

The moonlight fell upon her sweet, pale, uplifted face. There were tears in her eyes that glittered like frost.

But George, for all his love, showed a little masculine impatience.

“Reserve is very good,” he said; “but we can’t all be Lord Burleighs by holding our tongues. There is a sort of silence that is pregnant with nothing.”

“George, you cannot mean to insult my father?”

“No, dear. But why does he make such a mystery of his past? I would have mine as clear as a window, for all to look through. Why does he treat me with such suave and courteous opposition–permitting my suit, yet withholding his consent?”

“If you could be less democratic, dear–“

“It is a religion with me–not a brutal indulgence.”

“Perhaps he cannot dissociate the two. Then, he admires your genius and commends your courage; but your poor purse hungers, my lover, and he desires riches for his Plancine.”