We heard without interest or emotion that we were to be driven home by a different and longer way. Our only articulate longing was for tea, but that being a mere vision, as impossible as beautiful, we gradually took refuge in fatalism, telling ourselves that if we got home that night, well and good; if not, we could sleep in the wagonette, waking up obediently at intervals to make moonlight sketches of such of the _cocher’s_ friends as he chose to summon from their beds for the purpose. We were in the act of dividing our last gingerbread, while the cool breath of the Médoc evening gave us its first nip, and the vines became fragrant in the dew, and the chorus of _cigales_ in the roadside grass sounded like the rhythmic reeling of line off innumerable trout-rods, when I was thrown violently against my cousin by the collapse of the wagonette on one side, and after an instant of extreme anxiety and discomfort, we found ourselves rolled out in a heap into the vines, with the _cigales’_ note at our very ears, and the hind wheel of the wagonette finding a bed for itself in the shallow ditch beside us. [Illustration: THE COCHER MADE LIGHT OF IT.] CHAPTER VI. We stood side by side, my cousin and I, and viewed the disaster with the gloomy, helpless ignorance of jurymen at a coroner’s inquest, and the mirage of tea that had risen before our thirsty eyes a few moments before, sank into the yellow sand in which wallowed our broken-winged wagonette. The _cocher_ made light of it. There was a blacksmith quite close--_en effet_, a cousin of his own, and a man of great intelligence, and all would be arranged in a little quarter of an hour. My cousin with some trouble disinterred the Waterbury--she was in the habit of saying that she had no wish to display it as jewellery, but it seemed to me she might have struck a mean between a châtelaine or a wristlet, and a lair so profoundly situated that I hesitated to ask her the hour unless I knew she was going to bed. It was half-past six o’clock; the blacksmith, however intelligent, could not come without being fetched, the re-fixing of the wheel would take some time, getting back to Pauillac would take some more, and the evening was becoming chilly, as October evenings even in the Médoc have a knack of doing. Our driver had by this time untackled the tired white horse, and we were all pacing along toward nothing more definite than the setting sun, while hunger and ill-temper ran neck and neck in our bosoms. The road stretched implacably on to the horizon, its yellow reaches turning grey as the warmth slowly went out of the sky; the vintagers had all gone home to their dinners, and there was nothing moving except the topsails of a ship that glided spectrally along behind the shoulder of a low hill on our left, and told us of the nearness of the great river highway where the steamers and sailing vessels were going on their way, sublimely independent of such things as linch-pins or _table d’hôte_ at Pauillac.