"You brought it down to the sands. So I suppose you never noticed a strange-looking couple who passed along the deal boards just in front of us." Mrs. Thesiger laughed and her head fell back upon her pillow. But during that movement her eyes had never left her daughter's face. "A middle-aged man with stiff gray hair, a stiff, prim face, and a figure like a ramrod. Oh, there never was anything so stiff." A noticeable bitterness began to sound in her voice and increased as she went on. "There was an old woman with him as precise and old-fashioned as himself. But you didn't see them? I never saw anything so ludicrous as that couple, austere and provincial as their clothes, walking along the deal boards between the rows of smart people." Mrs. Thesiger laughed as she recalled the picture. "They must have come from the Provinces. I could imagine them living in a chateau on a hill overlooking some tiny village in--where shall we say?" She hesitated for a moment, and then with an air of audacity she shot the word from her lips--"in Provence." The name, however, had evidently no significance for Sylvia, and Mrs. Thesiger was relieved of her fears. "But you didn't see them," she repeated, with a laugh. "Yes, I did," said Sylvia, and brought her mother up on her elbow again. "It struck me that the old lady must be some great lady of a past day. The man bowed to you and--" She stopped abruptly, but her mother completed the sentence with a vindictiveness she made little effort to conceal. "And the great lady did not, but stared in the way great ladies have. Yes, I had met the man--once--in Paris," and she lay back again upon her pillow, watching her daughter. But Sylvia showed no curiosity and no pain. It was not the first time when people passed her mother that she had seen the man bow and the woman ignore. Rather she had come to expect it. She took her book from her berth and opened it. Mrs. Thesiger was satisfied. Sylvia clearly did not suspect that it was just the appearance of that stiff, old-fashioned couple which had driven her out of Trouville a good month before her time--her, Mrs. Thesiger of the many friends. She fell to wondering what in the world had brought M. de Camours and his mother to that watering place amongst the brilliant and the painted women. She laughed again at the odd picture they had made, and her thoughts went back over twenty years to the time when she had been the wife of M. de Camours in the château overlooking the village in Provence, and M. de Camours' mother had watched her with an unceasing jealousy. Much had happened since those days. Madame de Camours' watchings had not been in vain, a decree had been obtained from the Pope annulling the marriage. Much had happened. But even after twenty years the memory of that formal life in the Provencal château was vivid enough; and Mrs. Thesiger yawned. Then she laughed. Monsieur de Camours and his mother had always been able to make people yawn.