"file Road 
to Libertu 
By 
E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM. 
ILLUSTRATED BY 
ESANNISON 
HE house was set in a cleft 
of the pine - covered hills, 
fashioned of mouldering white 
stone painted pink, struggling 
against its inborn ugliness 
and succeeding only because of 
the beauty of its setting — the 
orchard, pink and white with masses of cherry- 
blossom, in the background, the brown earth 
with its neatly-trained vines. Felice’s window 
faced east, and as usual, when the sun came 
from behind the hill and lay across the faded 
carpet of her room, she rose with a yawn, sat 
up in bed for a moment or two, slipped softly 
out, and stood before the window. 
It was always the same, what followed. 
She stood and looked for a while at that 
towering wall of stony, pine-hung mountain, 
at the blue-smocked men and women crouch- 
ing in the vineyard, at the white church upon 
the hill, the orchard touched with snow, and 
the corner of a field of violets, bending a little 
with the morning breeze. And then she 
sighed. It was always the same. 
Felice bathed and dressed, daintily and 
carefully, herself like some exquisite pink 
and white flower slowly opening her petals. 
She left her room — as bare almost it was as a 
nun’s cell — spotlessly neat, with the breeze 
sweeping in through the wide-flung window, 
a breeze which brought a perfume of mimosa 
to mingle with the fainter odour of lavender 
which hung about the linen and the plain 
white muslin curtains of the little chamber. 
She took her morning coffee, served by an 
apple-cheeked, sour-faced domestic, in a 
corner of the wooden balcony which had been 
built out from the one habitable living-room. 
The petals from a climbing rose-tree fell upon 
the coarse but spotless cloth, bees hummed 
around the drooping jasmine, the soft sun- 
shine every moment grew warmer. Felice 
finished her breakfast, yawned, and dreamed 
for a time with her eyes lifted to the hills. 
Then she rose, shook out her neat white skirt, 
fetched a pink parasol, wandered for a little 
time in the garden and orchard, and then, 
turning her face southwards, went out to 
meet the adventure of her life. 
She walked down the straight, cypress- 
bordered path— a mere cart-track across the 
brown-soiled vineyard — down a narrow lane 
until she reached the one spot which she 
never neared without some quickening of the 
blood. For Felice was nineteen years old, and 
beautiful, though no one but the glass had ever 
told her so. And this was the road to liberty, 
the main road to Toulon and Marseilles on 
one side, to Cannes and Monte Carlo on 
the other. She had told herself repeatedly 
that if ever freedom came to her it would 
come along this road. And because her worn- 
out invalid father had been a little more 
peevish and trying than ever on the night 
before, and because of other things, freedom 
seemed to her just now so specially desirable. 
Her adventure came to her in a cloud of 
dust — a long, grey motor-car, with luggage 
strapped on behind, and two men. Unrecog- 
nizable though they were, she caught the 
flash of their curious eyes as they passed. 
Then she stepped back with a little gesture 
of dismay. A cloud of dust enveloped her. 
She bent her pink sunshade to protect her- 
self ; she was disposed to be a little irritable. 
Then her heart suddenly commenced to beat 
