"How _nice_ French people are!" she said as she sank back on the hot cushions. And now there was leisure to think--real thoughts, not those broken, harassing dreamings that had buzzed about her between 57 Boulevard Montparnasse and the station. Also, as some one had suggested, one could cry. She leaned back, eyes shut. Her next thought was: "I have been to sleep." She had. The train was moving out of a station labelled Fontainebleau. "And oh, the trees!" said Betty, "the green thick trees! And the sky. You can see the sky." Through the carriage window she drank delight from the far grandeur of green distances, the intimate beauty of green rides, green vistas, as a thirsty carter drinks beer from the cool lip of his can--a thirsty lover madness from the warm lips of his mistress. "Oh, how good! How green and good!" she told herself over and over again till the words made a song with the rhythm of the blundering train and the humming metals. "Bourron!" Her station. Little, quiet, sunlit, like the station at Long Barton; a flaming broom bush and the white of May and acacia blossom beyond prim palings; no platform--a long leap to the dusty earth. The train went on, and Betty and her boxes seemed dropped suddenly at the world's end. The air was fresh and still. A chestnut tree reared its white blossoms like the candles on a Christmas tree for giant children. The white dust of the platform sparkled like diamond dust. May trees and laburnums shone like silver and gold. And the sun was warm and the tree-shadows black on the grass. And Betty loved it all. "_Oh_!" she said suddenly, "it's a year ago to-day since I met _him_--in the warren." A shadow caressed and stung her. She would have liked it to wear the mask of love foregone--to have breathed plaintively of hopes defeated and a broken heart. Instead it shewed the candid face of a real homesickness, and it spoke with convincing and abominably aggravating plainness--of Long Barton. The little hooded diligence was waiting in the hot white dust outside the station. "But yes.--It is I who transport all the guests of Madame Chevillon," said the smiling brown-haired bonnetless woman who held the reins. Betty climbed up beside her. Along a straight road that tall ranks of trees guarded but did not shade, through the patchwork neatness of the little culture that makes the deep difference between peasant France and pastoral England, down a steep hill into a little white town, where vines grew out of the very street to cling against the faces of the houses and wistaria hung its mauve pendants from every arch and lintel. The Hotel Chevillon is a white-faced house, with little unintelligent eyes of windows, burnt blind, it seems, in the sun--neat with the neatness of Provincial France. Out shuffled an old peasant woman in short skirt, heavy shoes and big apron, her arms bared to the elbow, a saucepan in one hand, a ladle in the other. She beamed at Betty. "I wish to see Madame Chevillon."