The familiar aspect of the buildings, totally unchanged from the time when he had played his part in what appeared as a most successful operation at the beginning of the war, inspired Bolt with great confidence in the success of his present enterprise, vague as it was, but the great charm of which lay, no doubt, in mental associations with his younger years. Nothing seemed easier than to stride across the forty yards of open ground and rouse the farmer whom he remembered so well, the well-to-do man, a grave, sagacious royalist in his humble way; certainly, in Bolt’s view, no traitor to his country, and preserving so well his dignity in ambiguous circumstances. To Bolt’s simple vision neither that man nor his wife could have changed. In this view of Arlette’s parents Bolt was influenced by the consciousness of there having been no change in himself. He was the same Jack Bolt, and everything around him was the same as if he had left the spot only yesterday. Already he saw himself in the kitchen which he knew so well, seated by the light of a single candle before a glass of wine and talking his best French to that worthy farmer of sound principles. The whole thing was as well as done. He imagined himself a secret inmate of that building, closely confined indeed, but sustained by the possible great results of his watchfulness, in many ways more comfortable than on board the _Amelia_ and with the glorious consciousness that he was, in Captain Vincent’s phrase, the actual physical eyes of the Fleet. He didn’t, of course, talk of his private feelings to Captain Vincent. All those thoughts and emotions were compressed in the space of not much more than a minute or two while, holding on with one hand to his bush and having got a good foothold for one of his feet, he indulged in that pleasant anticipatory sense of success. In the old days the farmer’s wife used to be a light sleeper. The farmhands which, he remembered, lived in the village or were distributed in stables and outhouses, did not give him any concern. He wouldn’t need to knock heavily. He pictured to himself the farmer’s wife sitting up in bed, listening, then rousing her husband, who, as likely as not, would take the gun standing against the dresser downstairs and come to the door.