holding it high above the surface of the water, whereas each of the girls had sought apparently to lessen the distance as much as possible, and dropping it out of sight straight away.

"Look at that!" he crowed. "My girl will say snap as soon as I say snip. Here's her engagement ring!"

Plunging his left hand into a pocket, he brought to light the ring and staple torn from Sainte Barbe's tower. When hanging with one hand to the last hold-fast, on the wall overlooking sixty feet of sheer precipice, he had calmly pocketed the ring that proved treacherous.

Evidently Laurence Tollemache was a young man who might be trusted not to lose his head in an emergency.

Mère Pitou was not to be persuaded to tempt fortune, and Ingersoll, who was sketching the well rapidly and most effectively, was left alone, because Barbe, who would have called him to come in his turn, was bidden sharply by her mother to mind her own business.

Tollemache and Yvonne climbed the rocky path together when they began the return journey to Le Faouet. In the rays of the afternoon sun the rough granite boulders sparkled as though they were studded with innumerable small diamonds.

"Haven't you forgiven me yet, Yvonne?" he said, noticing her distrait air.

She almost started, so far away were her thoughts. "Oh, let us forget that stupidity," she replied. "I was thinking of something very different. Tell me, Lorry, has my father ever spoken to you of my mother?"

"No," he said.

"Do you know where she is buried?"

"No."

She sighed. Her light-hearted companion's sudden taciturnity was not lost on her. Neither Madame Pitou, Ingersoll's friend and landlady during eighteen years, nor Tollemache, who worked with him daily, could read his eyes like Yvonne, and she knew he was acting a part when he smiled because Sainte Barbe's well announced that she would be married at the second asking. And the odd thing was that she had endeavored to drop the first pin so that it would not fall into the fateful space. None but she herself had noted how it plunged slantwise through the water as though drawn by a lodestone.

Even Tollemache nursed a grievance against the well's divination. "I say," he broke in, "that pin proposition is all nonsense, don't you think?"

For some occult reason she refused to answer as he hoped she would. "You never can tell," she said. "Mère Pitou believes in it, and she has had a long experience of life's vagaries."

From some distance came Madeleine's plaint. "Just imagine! Six times! In six years I shall be twenty-five. I don't credit a word of it—so there! At the last pardon Peridot danced with me all the afternoon."

Even little Barbe was not satisfied. "Mama said the other day," she confided, "that I might be married before I was twenty."

Ingersoll and Mère Pitou, bringing up the rear, were silent; Madame because this hill also was steep, and Ingersoll because of thoughts that came unbidden. In fact, Sainte Barbe had perplexed some of her pilgrims.