“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

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 mediaeval 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,