And then they all sauntered off to the stalls, where Lord Rex, we may be sure, found ample scope for his veiled yet poignant irony among the crosses, medals, rosaries, and relics that had been blest, ‘_tout bonnement_,’ away in Rome, by his Holiness! Marjorie, meanwhile, pursued her way through shadow and sunshine, unconscious in which direction the fiery haste of her steps was bearing her. When her temper had burnt out--in the space, say, of two minutes and a half--she perceived that she was once more in open country, alone among colza stacks and fields of ripening barley, but on a less frequented road, amidst a landscape with wider horizons than the road and landscape she and Dinah had traversed in coming to Langrune from the sea. How good it was to breathe this wild, well-oxygenised air! With what glad senses Marjorie gazed about her across the plains, rippling, as the sun lowered, in lucent amber waves, and shaded deliciously at intervals by rows of pearly, smoke-coloured poplar! A family of peasant farmers drove by in one of their old-world Norman harvest waggons--coeval, perhaps, with Andros Bartrand’s sickle! Friendly nods, gleaming smiles from sunburnt faces, were bestowed on the little girl as the homely cartload jolted on. She watched with wistful eyes until the waggon lessened, was lost to sight in the long perspective of white road. Seating herself beside a ditch, under shadow of a solitary pollard willow, a sudden vision of vines and olives and Spanish sierras arose, with all the strength of inherited nostalgia, in Marjorie’s breast. If the harvesters would only have carried her a league or two onward with them! She had nothing of value in her possession but a watch. How many francs could one raise upon a watch, Marjorie Bartrand wondered, in some primitive, unsuspecting Norman town? Enough, surely, living among peasant people, and eking means out by an occasional day’s work at onion-weeding or colza stacking, to carry one down to the frontier, the cherished land of dreams. A letter could be sent to relieve the Seigneur’s mind, and.... And then, glancing back along the chaussée, Marjorie saw a man’s figure advancing towards her with steady quickness; a figure she knew over-well, darkly outlined against the chrome yellow of the sky. So Ada de Carteret was forsaken. Her heart went pit-a-pat. She would have given a fortune to fly, yet stirred not! One minute later and her nostalgia was cured. Longings for vine and olive and Spanish sierra had vanished, all, before the unromantic English presence of Geoffrey Arbuthnot. CHAPTER XXV YOU--AND I! ‘You have found out a right pleasant spot.’ Geff settled himself coolly into repose among the long wayside grasses that clothed the opposite or field side of the ditch. ‘Our friends, when they have bought themselves each a cross and medal, are going down to watch the Parisians return from fishing. You and I will have the best of it among the barley here.’ ‘You--and I!’