and feast-days, laugh and jabber the poor, gaunt rats of men and women who are hidden away in the dark corners of Paris, the refuse of the old Commune, the fermenting mother of a new one! Into one of those treacherous holes, between the caves of a wine-cellar, you would have to penetrate to find Madame Cuano's.

It was the hotel of the Spanish Embassy early in the seventeenth century, and it still turns an aged, aristocratic façade to the river. The other buildings around the entrance are older. The little lantern-room over the outer court (they gossip from an old tradition) was once held by Calvin, when, as a young man, he made his studies in Paris. Perhaps not, but up there he might well have lived, solitarily swinging a bitter eye over the gay, priest-governed city, the great cathedral at his feet, or from the little slit of a window in the side he might have peeped at the life of the great men beneath him. How strongly his name possessed the place! Ransom always thought of him, as of a grimy parchment in a black leather binding, suspiciously reconnoitring his comings in late at night, or insinuating an uncomfortable, harassing sense of the future into his parleyings with the coquettish mademoiselle. Probably he never disturbed Clover Green, for her ancestors had carried his hell-fire to a new world, and if in moving westward to St. Louis they had let a little of the brimstone fizzle out, what then? She had brought back to old Paris the sweeter elements of his faith. And as for Ransom, it was just as well to be reminded, whenever he crossed the court on some outward errand, that a sterner world lay beyond, perhaps.

If Calvin held the outworks, so to speak, another passionate spirit was laid inside, in the little gravelly patch that now takes the place of the stately garden which once sloped down in terraces toward the river. Danton, so one said, was brought here from the guillotine by some accident, here into the privacy of the order of things he had hated.

Near the mound where he was supposed to lie, a great vine of English ivy had grown over a low, red-tiled house. That house, with its quaintly pitched roofs and squat white chimneys of the last century, closed in the fourth side of the hotel the side once open for the garden and the

river view—and made a cosey, contained little community. It was brav, as Madame Cuano called it, with a few yards of turf, a great mulberry-tree that stretched one gaunt arm across to the ivy-covered wall, a patch or two of flowers, and the little iron tables where the pensionnaires took coffee whenever the noon sun could keep them from freezing. On the yellow wall, just under Ransom's window, was a great bas-relief, a tangle of deftly flowing robes, long legs of women, and supple bodies. And across the angle of the court two stately women were put into the wall, their slim, shapely arms protecting the window. They remained to tell of the better times.

The wall of the house opposite dipped at the angles, opening to Ransom's view at the left a few yards of the cathedral, just a bit of the transept and one or two of those slim buttresses in silver-white stone that prop its lofty choir. What a magnificent sight it must have been before, when the whole flank of the church, with its soaring buttresses, its heavy towers, and the queer little steeple stuck on the middle, shot up at once into sight from this same window! Some days in the winter, a reddish glow falls on the gray stone from the passing sun and jewels the building in soft rose lights. Then you would expect the smart new buildings all about to fade away, and down the river, from the forest of Vincennes, a long, low barge to come sliding by Notre Dame filled with warriors and Saint Louis at their head. You could watch them put ashore and ascend the steps on their way to take the sacrament.

At the right the view was closed by the black walls of Saint Severin. The rumble of the organ and the bell-ringing at the offering of the host were the only sounds to disturb the deep neglect of the pension. Sometimes Ransom fancied he caught a passing whiff of the Catholic odor, one could not call it merely incense, on its way heavenward.

One other thing should not be forgotten -Madame Cuano herself. She was a fine old girl, no less irreverent phrase would do-her gray hair cut short and brushed flat over a large head, a short full figure, a little like a sailor's, with a man's reefer and a broad collar. Mornings she generally wore a kind of serge pinafore over all,

for she was a sculptor in a small way, as well as the owner of the pension. She made little copies in marble and terra-cotta, much fancied by the American tourist. She also repaired bric-à-brac, and in this way had a clientèle in musty corners of the Faubourg St. Germain. She was naïvely practical about her art.

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Les Américains achètent choses comme ça! Eh, bien que voulez-vous?"

An ideal of artistic effort never crossed her mind or troubled her regular hours of work. She was pityingly courteous to the poor American girls or boys who spent their days over in the studios, struggling to utter something that had never before been said.

Ransom was taken into her high favor, almost at once, and given the seat next to her at dinner. Little by little he absorbed her philosophy of life, mumbled in a rapid, syncopated French.

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She will tell you when you have been here two months about her family," remarked Miss Clover Green. "It's vrai aristocracy, way back, but during the Revolution strange marriages had to be made. Her great grandmother took the gardener's son, temporarily, and hence the name. Then when you know her a month better you will hear about the uncle, a member of the Conseil d'État under the last Napoleon. By spring time you will be asked out to Granville-that's a little bit of a place in the country which she has managed to buy."

"You have been through it all?" "Oh, yes. Auntie and I have been here off and on three years. You see, I model; everyone has to do something, and I am in Durand's atelier in the morning. We used to have an apartment beyond the Luxembourg, but stocks went down and I bought a palace in Venice; it doesn't pay