But mademoiselle did not wish to see them.  It would be worse than nothing to give a base imitation.  Instead of feeling flattered, St. Christopher would have a right to be annoyed, and perhaps to punish.  Recklessly I passed across the counter ten francs, and made the coveted saint mine.  Then I darted out, just in time to meet Mr. Dane at the door of the restaurant.

“This is for you,” I said.  “It’s to give you luck.”

I pressed the coin into his hand, and he looked at it on his open palm.  For an instant I was afraid he was going to make fun of it, and my superstition concerning it, which I couldn’t quite deny if cross-questioned.  But his smile didn’t mean that.

“You’ve just bought this—­to give to me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I nodded.

“Why?  Not because you want to ‘pay me back’ for asking you to lunch—­or any such villainous thing, I hope, because—­”

I shook my head.  “I didn’t think of that.  I got it because I wanted to bring you luck.”

Then he slipped the coin into an inside pocket of his coat.  “Thank you,” he said.  “But didn’t I tell you that you’d brought me something better than luck already?”

“What is better than luck?”

“An interest in life.  And the privilege of being a brother.”

CHAPTER XII

It would be a singularly hard-headed, cold-hearted person who could set out for Vaucluse without the smallest thrill; and hard heads and cold hearts don’t “run in our family.”  As we spun away from the Hotel de l’Europe soon after two o’clock that afternoon I felt that I was largely composed of thrill.  Cold as the wind had grown, the thrill kept me warm, mingling in my veins with ozone.

Inside the car the middle-aged honeymooners had an air of desperate resignation which the consciousness of doing their duty according to Baedeker gives to tourists.  The tap was turned on in the newly invented heating-apparatus in the car floor, through which hot water from the radiator can be made to circulate; and I wondered, if this extreme measure were resorted to already, what would be left to do when we reached those high, white altitudes of which the chauffeur had been speaking.  I prayed that Lady Turnour might not read in the papers about the “phenomenal fall of snow” in those regions, for if she did I was afraid that even Mr. Dane’s magnetic powers of persuasion might fail to get her there.  He might dangle Queen Margherita of Italy over her head in vain, if worst came to worst:  for what are queens to the most inveterate tuft-hunters if the feet be cold?  Yet now that “adventures” were vaguely prophesied, I felt I could not give up the promised gorges and mountains.

Out of Avignon we slid, past the old, old ramparts and the newer but impressive walls, and turned at the right into the Marseilles road.  “Vaucluse!” said a kilometre-stone, and then another and another repeated that enchanted and enchanting word, as we flew onward between the Rhone and the Durance.