The dappled shadows of the limes lay brightly blue at his feet. His bleached hands were clasped behind him on his stick. He wore a black silk skull-cap and a white silk handkerchief was knotted around his neck. It had always frightened her a little to see Grand-père, and it frightened her now to remember him, the _commandant_, defeated, broken; yet still with that sombre fire smouldering in his eyes. “_Tout-à-fait une tête de Port-Royal_,” she had heard someone say of him once; and so a devout noble of the time of Louis Quatorze might have looked. Only she did not see Grand-père as appeased, withdrawn from the world and its illusions; he brooded, rather, in bitterness upon them. He minded everything so terribly. She remembered as if it were yesterday the dreadful summer afternoon when the bell had clanged hoarsely in the courtyard, and Mélanie, wiping her steaming arms on her apron, had come clapping in her _savates_ across the paving-stones to let in the opulent gentleman who had arrived in his motor to take away the Clouets. That was the day that had revealed to her what Grand-père’s poverty must be. He had sold the Clouets at last; after selling so many things. The great gaunt salles, the little panelled salons, the rows of incommodious bedrooms, looking, from high up, over the plains, all were empty; and the Clouets now were to go. With a child’s awed heart, half comprehending, Alix had followed Mélanie and the stranger, up the winding staircase in the turret—Mélanie took him by that circuitous route so that Grand-père should catch no glimpse of him; along the chill stone passages, to the little room where she and Grand-père sat and read in the evenings. The _lit de repos_ stood there, draped in its tattered brocades, dignified and irrelevant, for no one ever thought of lying down on it; and Grand-père’s old _bergère_, and her _tabouret_ drawn up to the table before her histories. And there, upon the sea-green panelled walls, the silvery Clouets hung, Mouverays among them; frigidly smiling in their ruffs. Mélanie, mute, grim, inscrutable, helped the gentleman from Paris to take them down, one by one, and wrap them up and carry them across the courtyard to the waiting car: and Alix had watched it all, knowing that a final disaster had fallen upon her house.