"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 cafés, of an evening in summer or of a Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebière 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 Magdelène 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.