Page:A M Williamson - The Motor Maid.djvu/204

188 records to show, she was ready to start, almost cheerfully, at ten o'clock.

I was allowed to be of the party, laden with mackintoshes for my master and mistress; and I did n't admire the triumphal arch at Orange nearly as much as I had admired the smaller and older one at St. Remy. But Lady Turnour admired it far more, and was so nice to Sir Samuel that he thought it the arch of the world. They put their heads together over the same volume of Baedeker, which was an exquisite pleasure to the poor man, and he was so pathetic I could have cried into his footsteps, as he read (pronouncing almost everything wrong) about the building of the Arch of Tiberius. "Why, that 's just like a sweet little statuette I used to have standing on a table in my drawing-room window!" exclaimed Lady Turnour, looking up at the beautiful Winged Victory. "You might think it was a copy!"

Although the histories say Orange was n't very important in Roman days, it has taken revenge by letting everything not Roman fall into decay, except, of course, its memories of the family through which William the Silent of Holland became William of Orange. The house of the first William of Orange, the hero of song who rode back wounded from Roncesvalles to his waiting wife, is gone now, save for a wall and a buttress or two on a lonely hill of the old town; yet the arch, which was old when his château was begun, still towers dark yellow as tarnished Etruscan gold against the sky; and the Roman theatre is the grandest out of Italy. Lady Turnour could not see why the Comédie Française should produce plays there, even once a year, when they could do