La Tremblaye itself had become a flourishing manufacturing town, and to our jaundiced and disillusioned eyes everybody and everything was as ugly as could be--and I can't say we made much of a bag in the way of souvenirs. We were told that young Laferté was a barrister at Angers, prosperous and married. We deliberated whether we would hunt him up and talk of old times. Then we reflected how curiously cold and inhospitable Frenchmen can sometimes be to old English friends in circumstances like these--and how little they care to talk of old times and all that, unless it's the Englishman who plays the host. Ask a quite ordinary Frenchman to come and dine with you in London, and see what a genial and charming person he can be--what a quick bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the warmth of your British welcome. Then go and call on him when you find yourself in Paris--and you will soon learn to leave quite ordinary Frenchmen alone, on their own side of the Channel. Happily, there are exceptions to this rule! Thus the sweet Laferté remembrance, which had so often come back to me in my dreams, was forever spoiled by this unlucky trip. It had turned that leaf from the tablets of my memory into a kind of palimpsest, so that I could no longer quite make out the old handwriting for the new, which would not be obliterated, and these were confused lines it was hard to read between--with all my skill! Altogether we were uncommonly glad to get back to the Villa Montmorency--from the distorted shadows of a nightmare to happy reality. There, all was fresh and delightful; as boys we had often seen the outside walls of that fine property which had come to the speculative builder at last, but never a glimpse within; so that there was no desecration for us in the modern laying out of that beautiful double garden of ours, whatever there might have been for such ghosts of Montmorencys as chose to revisit the glimpses of the moon. We haunted Auteuil, Passy, Point du Jour, Suresnes, Courbevoie, Neuilly, Meudon--all the familiar places. Especially we often haunted the neighborhood of the rond point de l'Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. One afternoon, as he and I and Leah and Ida were driving round what once was our old school, we stopped in the lane not far from the porte-cochère, and Barty stood up on the box and tried to look over the wall. Presently, from the grand stone loge which had replaced Jaurion's den, a nice old concierge came out and asked if we desired anything. We told him how once we had been at school on that very spot, and were trying to make out the old trees that had served as bases in "la balle au camp," and that if we really desired anything just then it was that we might become school-boys once more! "Ah, ma foi! je comprends ça, messieurs--moi aussi, j'ai été écolier, et j'aimais bien la balle au camp," said the good old man, who had been a soldier.