Maman’s _déjeuner_, the long buttered _petits pains_ with ham in them, she had eaten on the boat; and, far away, seen across the leaden waters of the November channel, was the bright _petit déjeuner_, in Paris that morning, and Maman before the wood fire, her beauty still clouded by sleep, sweet, sombre, and gay as only she could be, her russet locks tossed back and her white arms bare in the white woollen _peignoir_. “They will, I know, be good to my darling,” Maman had said, buttering her roll while Albertine brought in the coffee, “and keep her warm and well-fed through this hard winter.” Firmness and resource breathed from Maman. She knew what she was doing and Alix saw herself powerless in her hands. Yet she could read her, too. Even though she could not always interpret the words, she could always read Maman, and the meaning, as it were, of the sentence would come to her in a feeling rather than in an idea. She had felt that morning that Maman’s heart was not at ease. It was true that the Armistice had been signed but the other day, that the war was hardly over, and that everything would be more expensive than ever. It was true that she was going to friends, though to unknown friends; to the family of their dear Captain Owen, killed in battle only nine months ago. He had so often said that they must know his family, and it had been his mother who had written so kindly to say that Giles would meet her. But if all this were so natural, why had she felt that touch of artifice in Maman’s manner, that resource in her so many reasons? Perhaps they did not really want her. And perhaps there was some mistake and they did not expect her to-night. If no one came, what was she to do? She had only five shillings in her purse. The porter had placed her little box and her dressing-case on the seat beside her, and if no one came was she to sit on here all night, in the waiting-room, this horrid feeling, half hunger, half fear, gnawing at the pit of her stomach? “_Dieu, que j’ai faim!_” she thought; and as she now leaned back her head and closed her eyes, the sadness that flowed into her carried her far back to Montarel again and it was Grand-père that she saw, passing under the pollarded lime-trees with his dragging footsteps and looking down on the ground as he went, with no eyes for the climbing vineyards, no eyes for the plains, the river, the Alps; his short white beard and jutting nose giving him still the air of a _commandant_, high on his fortress; but so old, so ill, so poor and so despairing.