Burgoyne has been told, both by his guide-book and by his _table-d'hôte_ neighbour, that he ought to see Notre Dame d'Afrique; nor is he loth to pay further obeisance to that high lady who already yesterday beckoned to him across the blue floor of her waters. He does not tell Cecilia of his intention, as he knows that she would offer to accompany him; but on leaving her he takes his way through the gay French town, along its Arab-named streets, Bab-a-Zoun and Bab-el-Oued, towards the village of St. Eugène, and breasts the winding road that, with many an elbow and bend, heading a deep gorge that runs up from the sea to the church-foot, leads him within her portals. The congregation is sparse--a few peasants, a blue and red Zouave, and several inevitable English. Now and again a woman, clad in humble black that tells of prayers in vain, goes up with her thin candle, and, lighting it, sticks it in its sconce among the others that burn before the altar. For awhile Burgoyne finds it pleasant after his climb to sit and watch her, and speculate pityingly with what hope of still possible good to herself she is setting her slender taper alight--now that her treasure has all too obviously gone down beneath the waves; to sit and speculate, and smell the heady incense, and listen to the murmur of chanted supplication; but presently, growing weary of the uncomprehended service, he slips outside to the little plateau, with its view straight out--no importunate land-object intervening--towards the sea, across which a little steamer is cutting her way; and on the horizon two tiny shining sails are lying. Here, on this bold headland, it seems as if one were one's self in mid-ocean; and one has to lean far over the low wall in order to realize that there is some solid earth between us and it; that two full cities of the dead--a Jewish and a Christian--lie below. From the land-cemeteries to the vast sea-cemetery--for read by the light of that plain inscription upon which his eyes are resting, what is even the azure Mediterranean but a grave? For the matter of that, what is all life but a grave? "First our pleasures die, and then Our hopes, and then our fears, and when These are dead, the debt is due: Dust claims dust, and we die too." He turns away, and, muttering these words half absently between his lips, begins to make the circuit of the church; and in doing so, comes suddenly upon three persons who are apparently similarly employed. The party consists of a man and two ladies. Being a little ahead of him, they are, for the first moment or two, not aware of his presence, an ignorance by which he, rather to his own discomfiture, profits to overhear a scrap of their conversation certainly not intended for his ears.