"Somebody was saying that the Allonbys don't quite hit it off," her friend told her husband afterwards. "And it's my opinion that she doesn't know where he is. I wonder if _he_ knows where _she_ is?" When the wife of _the_ Allonby reached her shelter on the ridge that night, she avoided meeting anybody, especially Agatha, who was equally anxious to avoid meeting her, and for the same reason--that she had been having a good cry. But Agatha knew perfectly well why she had had recourse to those waters of comfort, while Ermengarde had not the remotest idea. Having felt the usual relief from the world-old remedy, brushed out her hair, wrapped herself in a dressing-gown, and smelt M. Isidore's latest floral offering, Mrs. Allonby lighted a tall candle and set to work to master the contents of the publisher's parcel. So that, when an orange and crimson sunrise came up gloriously out of a peacock green sea, it showed a woman asleep in an easy-chair by a guttering candle, her head on one arm on a table, and half-hidden in a cloud of fair hair, with a volume labelled "Storm and Stress" on the floor at her side. Chapter XIV At Turbia "What Roman strength Turbia showed In ruin by the mountain road. How like a gem, beneath, the city Of little Monaco, basking, glowed." "Little Monaco, basking," and glowing, too, as the poet says, sits on its rock that runs out into the sea, in a world of its own, cut off, distinct, aloof from the every-day world, like some enchanted princess, walled away from reality in a faery land by rose and fire. The tiny city, that is also a principality, with a tiny harbour and arsenal at the rock foot, and a castled palace where it joins the mainland, is little more than a stone's throw--less than a long-range rifle-shot--from Monte Carlo, but in atmosphere worlds away. It has nothing in common with it, except the deep gorge stretching behind both and backed by the craggy bastion of the Tête du Chien and the dark rich sea, that breaks impartially upon the rocky base of each.