"No, no," she cried. "If they are dead, I don't want to know." So Carrier with all his mascots had fallen at last, and he would never cultivate that little farm in the Lyonnais; she remembered how he had boasted of the view across the valley of the Saône to the long line of the Alps: far wider now was his view, and his room at the _pension_ was the abode of owls. She read the paragraph in the French paper: he had been killed early in September very gloriously. If Paradise might be the eternal present of a well-beloved dream, he would have found his farm; if human wishes were not vanity, he was at peace. The brief snow had melted, and through a drenching afternoon of rain Sylvia packed up; it was pleasant to think that at any rate she should travel southward, for the _pension_ was unbearable on these winter days and long nights filled with a sound of shadows. Again Sylvia was minded to brave the journey north and return to England, but again an overmastering impulse forbade her. Her destiny was written otherwise, and if she fought against the impulse not to go back, she felt that she should be cast up and rejected by the sea of life. Mère Gontran, having caught a slight chill, went to bed immediately after dinner, and invited Sylvia to come and talk to her on her last evening. It was an odd place, this bedroom that she had chosen; and very odd she looked lying in the old four-poster, her head tied up in a bandana scarf and beside her, with his wrinkled head on the pillow, James the bulldog. The four-poster seemed out of place against the match-boarding with which the room was lined, and the rest of the furniture gave one the impression of having been ransacked by burglars in a great hurry. On the wall opposite the bed was a portrait of Gontran, which by sheer bad painting possessed a sinister power like that of some black Byzantine Virgin; on either side of him were hung the cats' boxes, from which they surveyed their mistress with the same fixed stare as her painted husband. "Of course I should go mad if I slept in this room all by myself, and two hundred yards away from any habitation," Sylvia exclaimed. "Oh, I'm very fond of my room," said Mère Gontran. "But there again, I like to be alone with one foot in the grave." "I want to thank you for all your kindness," Sylvia began. "If you start thanking me, you'll make me fidget; and if I fidget, it worries James." "Still, even at the risk of upsetting James, I must tell you that I don't know what I should have done without you these six weeks. Perhaps one day when the war is over you'll come to England and then you'll have to stay with me in my cottage." "Ah, I shall never be able to leave the cats, not to mention the pony. I just happened to have a fancy for England to-day, but it's too late; I'm established here; I'm known. People in England might stare, and I should dislike that very much."