She did not seem to think that, looking at him attentively as though she wanted to make out just what he meant. Perhaps she did make out, for she now said gently, "I believe you are going to like it, Mr. Welles. I believe you are going to find here what, . . . what you deserve to find." She said quietly, "I hope we shall be good neighbors to you." She spoke so kindly, her look on him was so humane that he felt the water coming to his eyes. He was in a foolishly emotional state, these first days. The least little thing threw him off the track. It really _did_ seem hardly possible that it was all true. That the long grind at the office was over, the business he had always hated and detested, and the long, hateful slavery at the flat finished at last, and that he had come to live out what was left to him in this lovely, peaceful valley, in that quiet welcoming little house, with this sweet woman next door! He swallowed. The corners of his mouth twitched. What an old lunatic he was. But he did not dare trust himself to speak again. Now Vincent's voice rose. What a length of time Vincent had been silent,--he who never took a back seat for anybody! What had he been doing all this time, sitting there and staring at them with those awfully brilliant eyes of his? Very likely he had seen the silly weak tears so near the surface, had caught the sentimental twitch of the mouth. Yes, quite certainly, for, now he was showing his tact by changing the subject, changing it with a vengeance. "Mrs. Crittenden," he was saying, "my curiosity has been touched by that very fine photograph over there. I don't recognize the castle it shows." "That's in Bayonne," she said, and paused, her eyes speculatively on him. "No, Heavens no! You don't need to tell me that it's not Bayonne, New Jersey!" he answered her unspoken question violently. This made her laugh, opening her long eyes a little. He went on, "I've been as far as Pau, but never went into the Basque country." "Oh, Pau." She said no more than this, but Welles had the impression that these words somehow had made a comment on Vincent's information. Vincent seemed to think so too, and curiously enough not to think it a very favorable comment. He looked, what he almost never looked, a little nettled, and spoke a little stiffly. "It's a very fine specimen," he said briefly, looking again at the photograph. "Oh, it looks very much finer and bigger in the photograph than it really is," she told them. "It's only a bandbox of a thing compared with Coucy or Pierrefonds or any of the northern ones. It was built, you know, like the Cathedral at Bayonne, when the Plantagenets still held that country, but after they were practically pretty near English, and both the chateau and the Gothic cathedral seem queer aliens among the southern natives. I have the photograph up there on the wall only because of early associations. I lived opposite it long ago when I was a little girl."