Meantime Vane wandered through the rosy lanes, and the country came to him with a sense of rest. Life's silent woods are so near its highways, after all! And Vane had been a boy in this country, and it had a glamour for him; and, truly, it is a sweet corner in the world. He had gone out of it into all that was great and new, and now he came back to it, like a foot-worn pilgrim, with nothing but his staff and scrip. And as he thought this, he was passing a great army of the peasantry, not all peasantry, for many a lady, too, was walking amid the wooden shoes. Before the long procession, among the crucifixes, was carried the ermine banner of Queen Anne. It was the annual pilgrimage to Lourdes. He looked after them curiously, so earnestly they marched, chanting their simple aves and their litanies to St. Anne of Auray. But they did not walk to Gascony, but only to the railway, whence they went by special train. Vane did not feel deeply his mother's death. Indeed it hardly seemed that she could have died so lately; it was rather as if she had been dead many years. All the old seemed to have faded away out of his life, and everything new was rather unreal. As for Baby Thomas, she was either forgotten completely or dismissed with a slighting half-memory. The older love was as much in his mind and its ghost was as real a figure as this memory of yesterday. He walked over to Monrepos one afternoon when the doctor had a meeting at his house. The place was rented by an English family, and some stout girls were playing lawn tennis, while a comely youth, lying lazily on the grass, looked on critically over a short pipe. Vane sat on the walk and began to poke pebbles with his stick again. He had succeeded; and the result was emptiness. Why could not this poor sordid success have come sooner,--and his father, and so his mother, might have been alive to-day. XVII. WHEN he got home (Dr. Kérouec's house he called _home_) he found two American letters. One was a business letter, but on the other he recognized the familiar delicate angles of Miss Thomas's writing. He was displeased at this. The note was like some petty daily duty busying one in an hour of insight--like the call of the prompter in some stupid play. It changed all, even to the language of his thought. What the deuce can she have to say in a letter? he said to himself. He thought he had done with her.