At school André François was under a double disadvantage. In the class-room, he not only knew more than any other boy, but frequently and authoritatively corrected the teacher. In the yard his white flannel sailor suit, with its embroidered anchor and immense soft, red silk bow in front, his jaunty round sailor hat and dainty shoes--it had become the mode in Paris at that time to follow the English style in children's dress--were regarded with derisive and hostile looks by the sturdy blue- and brown-overalled town boys. Indeed, the little transplanted Parisian, as he stood in line with his fellows, looked very much like a lonely orchid in a bunch of dusty field-flowers. In the yard André François did not shine. His attitude was marked in the eyes of the indigenous youth by a supercilious stupidity. He neither knew nor cared for baseball, football, or any of the lesser sports which excite young America at playtime. He had, indeed, at first extended tentative invitations to a chosen few of his class-mates to engage in a fencing bout, but, finding that art entirely unknown, he contented himself, during recess, with sitting on the bench and reading from a French book, over the top of which he sometimes stared at his hot, excited school-mates with insolent superiority. They returned his contempt with full measure. One and all looked upon André François as a special brand of "Dago"--under which general head they classified all things Latin--protected from their scorn and patriotism by an arbitrary higher power in the form of a father who was a mine manager. André François, in turn, confided to his father that nobody but ignorant peasants, with whom no gentleman could associate, attended the school. So matters stood without a change in either direction two weeks after André François' arrival in town. No change of environment seemed strong enough to move him from his accustomed ways of thought. Every morning he started out for school at a quarter of nine followed by the omnipresent Angélique. Every afternoon he returned at three o'clock, still followed by Angélique. "Angélique! A nurse! A _bonne_!" As the manager of the White Star thought of her, he nearly bit the cigar, upon which he was chewing, in half. All the militant Americanism in him rose in revolt. He remembered his own bare-footed, swaggering youth, independent as the wind, insolent as a king. And now his son----. He stopped short in his pacing and stared wrathfully out into the street, which, like all the streets of the town, ended abruptly, without any preliminary slopes, in a sheer wall of rock which went up and up and up into a rugged mountain peak.