We motored over after lunch, through the soft, vague, intimate country that has no especial beauty and that is so beautiful. Some one called to us from the children's wing. It was "Miss," and she said, "No one will come to the door; go straight in, Madame is there. We are leaving, now, in five minutes." The children's mother stood half-way down the long white gallery. She looked very small and young. She said, "He won't let us wait till to-morrow. He has telephoned. We are going now, in five minutes." Down the long white length of the gallery, we saw the children's grandmother in the billiard-room, sitting against the big south window. She had the little baby in her arms, and the two bigger ones stood close against her. I went to her. She said, "You see, I am minding the babies." She said that just because one had to say something and not cry. We went away quickly. Wide misty fields under another red war sunset. I thought, how one felt war in the sunset. As we went, dusk came, gathering, deepening, very soft and kind. The fields and sky were darkly blue. There was a clear edge of the world, between the fields and the sky. And over the edge of the world there was a slim little new white moon. There was a small clear singing of field birds in the dusk, and there were bats abroad, and swallows. Friday, July 31st The beggars came as usual to the château for their Friday morning sous. There were the usual dozen of them; old men, and women with babies, and old women, and Margotte, the girl who was _innocente_, with her nodding head and hands that would never keep still. They came out of their holes in the marble quarries, and from nobody knew quite where, according to their long custom. All that was just as usual. But they were not as usual. They were angry because Venus and Olga, the great Danes of the moat bridge, barked at them. Venus and Olga always barked at them, but the beggars never had been angry before. Before, they had been, always, apologetic and conciliatory. An old woman with wild white hair screamed at the butler who came with the sous, and a young woman with a baby in her arms and two babies hiding in her skirts, shook her fist at the château windows. There was a sound of growling, snarling voices, more ugly than the dogs' barking, in the court of the lime trees. I went out to talk with the beggars. I was afraid of them, ridiculously and terribly, as one is afraid of things in dreams. That especially terrible fear which belongs to dreams, exaggerated, absurd, seemed to be fallen, suddenly, somehow, upon everything. I was afraid of the wild white hair of the old woman in the shawl, and of Margotte's twitching, clutching, crazy hands. I do not want to write about this day. I will always try not to remember it.