But in this we were fortunate. The key which I had carried so long in the inner pocket of my jacket turned easily. The door swung noiselessly inwards, and the clean breath of the salt breeze from the Camargue marshes made our faces pleasantly chill and our lips sticky. We locked the door on the outside, and in another minute stood in the roadway, looking back at the great ghostly pile of the Palace of the Monks--as Louis the XIV had called it, when he cut down the plans so that it should not rival in dimensions that "abyss of expenditure" which was Versailles. But it was no time to stand sentimentalising upon architecture. We turned and went down the vacant white road as fast as our legs would serve us. CHAPTER IV THROUGH THE ENEMY'S LINES "Halt there!" cried Deventer suddenly to me. We were passing a pleasant white and green villa with a light in one ground-floor window. I stopped, and Deventer took me by the arm, with forceful compulsion. "I am going to help _my_ father," he whispered. "Don't you run off without telling yours what you mean to do. He can't prevent you, if you have made your mind up." "He won't try--he will only be glad to get back to his books." "Perhaps, but at any rate tell him yourself. He will like it better than when the hue and cry gets up to-morrow over yonder. You take my word for it, Angus Cawdor." I did not want to go, for at that time I did not understand nor much like my father. But Deventer said that if I would not walk he would carry me, a threat which at any other time would have made me smile. However, to please him I walked carefully to the window. With his habitual thoughtlessness about external things, the sash swung a little open and the light air blew the curtains back. My father was sitting like a student, with a shawl over his knees, a quite necessary fire of olive roots smouldering on the andirons, and his head, shining and silvery, bent over a book in which he was making notes. I did not wish to startle him, so I spoke in English, and in as commonplace a tone as I could muster. "Father," I said, as if my calling hours were the most ordinary in the world, "will you come across to the window for a moment?" He rose instantly and came over to the open window, one half of which I had pushed wide. The note-book was still in his hand, and the breeze ruffled its leaves so that he shut and clasped it. "Why, Angus, where do you come from?" he said. "Is it late? Won't you come in? Are you on your way back to college?" "No, father," I said; "I ought to be, but I have made up my mind to go to the war. I have had enough of learning, and examinations disgust me even when I come out first." He looked at me long and quietly, and then nodded his head.