It was Mr. Etheridge who spoke. He was standing beside a low rustic seat which fronted the world-famous view from the Piazza at Nice. The sun was dropping into the horizon like a huge ball of crimson fire, the opal tints of the sky stretched far above their heads and even behind them. It was one blaze of glory in which a slim, girlish figure, leaning far back in the seat, seemed bathed. She was pale still, was this Stella, this little girl heroine of ours, but the dark look of trouble and leaden sorrow had gone, and the light of youth and youthful joy had come back to the dark eyes; the faint, ever ready smile hovered again about the red, mobile lips. "Sorrow" says Goethe, "is the refining touch to a woman's beauty," and it refined Stella's. She was lovely now, with that soft, ethereal loveliness which poets sing of, and artists paint, and we poor penman so vainly strive to describe. She looked up with a smile. "Homesick, uncle?" she murmurs. The old man strokes his beard, and glances at her. "I plead guilty," he says. "You cannot make a hermit crab happy if you take him out of his shell, and the cottage is my shell, Stella." She sighed softly, not with unhappiness, but with that tender reflectiveness which women alone possess. "I will go back when you please, dear," she says. "Hem!" he grunts. "There is someone else to consult, mademoiselle; that someone else seems particularly satisfied to remain where we are; but then I suppose he would be contented to remain anywhere so that a certain pale-faced, insignificant chit of a girl were near him." A faint blush, a happy flush spreads over the pale face, and the long lashes droop over the dark eyes. "At any rate we must ask him," says the old man; "we owe him that little attention at least, seeing how much long-suffering patience he has and continues to display." "Don't, uncle," murmurs the half-parted lips. "It is all very well to say 'don't,'" retorts the old man with a grim smile. "Seriously, don't you think that you are, to use an Americanism, playing it rather low down on the poor fellow?" "I--I--don't know what you mean," she falters. "Permit me to explain then," he says, ironically. "I--I don't want to hear, dear." "It is fitting that girls should be made to hear sometimes," he says, with a smile. "What I mean is simply this, that, as a man with something approaching a conscience and a fellow feeling for my kind, I feel it my duty to point out to you that, perhaps unconsciously, you are leading Leycester the sort of life that the bear who dances on hot bricks--if any bear ever does--is supposed to lead. Here for months, after no end of suffering----" "I have suffered too," she murmurs.