She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them to fall, upon trivial things. "You did not stop in Marseilles?" he asked her, turning again to the subject of her fevered trip with Jim. "We didn't get anywhere near it. I--we were in a hurry to get back to Paris. We--we thought it would be warmer in Paris." "Warmer in Paris than Marseilles?" "Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Marseilles, and so we came right back here." "You were not far from Marseilles. It is a pity that you did not see it. It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit at a table before one of the cafes, of an evening in summer or of a Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebiere or the rue Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime--you and your husband." "Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and I." "But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume." She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises. "It is," he said, "a place that should be shrine for every soul that has sinned the sins of the flesh. It is on a plateau--the particular point that I mean--a plateau of precipitous mountains. Upon this plateau are set more mountains, and one of these, the highest, a sheer cliff, rises almost to the clouds. Nearly at its top, a precipice below and a precipice above, there is a great cave converted into a chapel. That cave is the grotto where the Sainte Marie Magdelene spent, in penance, the last thirty years of her life." He stopped, his last sentence ending in an awed whisper. Muriel was not unmoved by his reverence. "You have been there, then?" she asked. "Long, long ago," he answered, "as a boy. But now, when my heart hungers and my soul is tired, I dream of that spot--the silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau, which seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells from below, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved." XVII THE CALL OF YOUTH That evening there came the beginning of the end. The next day was to be Mid-Lent, and the entire city throbbed with preparation; the pagan city of Paris, which is ever eager to celebrate any sort of fete of any sort of faith. All the gay thousands that had not observed the fast panted for the feast, and that night, so von Klausen had promised his two American friends, the _grand boulevard_ would be crowded from curb to curb and from the Porte St. Martin to the Madelaine.