Joseph shrugged his shoulders. "I am used to it now, Monsieur," said he; and I turned away my face to hide a smile. I knew that he missed the girl, and I was still more keenly aware that I missed a comrade. My fleeting impressions were hardly worth catching and taming, without him to help cage them; without his vivid mind to help colour the thoughts, which mine only sketched in black and white, it was easier to leave the canvas blank. We had decided last night that it would not be wise to attempt the journey by way of the Dent du Nivolets, as it was on a higher level than the summit of Mont Revard, and we should risk being again extinguished under a nightcap of snow. We descended, therefore, by the simpler and shorter route, but it was full of interest for the strangeness of the landscape, and the buildings which we reached on lower planes. The houses were no longer characteristically French, but a bastard Swiss. The heavy, overhanging roofs were thatched, and of enormous thickness; the walls of grey stone, with roughly carved, skeleton balconies. The peasants no longer smiled at us in good-natured curiosity, but regarded us dourly, though they were gravely civil if we had questions to ask. Although I gave Joseph no instructions, and he made no suggestions, by common consent we hastened on as if a prize were to be bestowed for our good speed, at the end of the journey. On other days we had sauntered, allowing the animals to snatch delicious _hors d'oeuvres_ from the bushes as they passed, but to-day Finois was in the depths of gloom. There was no grey Souris, no spectacled Fanny-anny to cheer him on the way, and if he reached out a wistful mouth towards a branch, he was hurried past it. How would we feel, I asked myself, if, with the inner man clamouring, we were driven remorselessly along a road decked on either side with exquisitely appointed tables, set out with all our favourite dishes, to be had for nothing--never once allowed to stop for a crumb of _pâté de foie gras_, or a bit of chicken in aspic? Yet asking myself this, I had no mercy on Finois. We stopped for lunch at a queer auberge, in an abortive village appropriately named Les Déserts, where the highroad for Chambéry began. An outer room roughly flagged with stone, was kitchen, nursery, and family living-room in one. It swarmed with children, and was presided over by two of Macbeth's witches, who were not separated from their cauldrons. I took them to be rival mothers-in-law, and they could have taught Innocentina some choice new expressions valuable to test upon donkeys or other heretics; but they sent me a steaming bowl of excellent coffee, when I half expected poison; fried me a couple of eggs with crisp brown lace round the edges, and took for my benefit, from one of the shelves that lined the nursery wall, the newest of a hundred loaves of hard black bread.