Madeleine nodded and told him to put in the horse--not that she could not have done it, but she must clean herself. Accordingly, half an hour later, there might have been seen issuing from the yard of the Spanish Farm, over the brick bridge, along the earth road that divided the manor pasture, out by the brick-pillared gate on to the road, surely the oldest, most repaired of high black gigs, drawn by an old white horse whose sonorous walk took it along at perhaps two miles an hour. Framed in the dark aperture of the hood, upright, expressionless, sat Madeleine, bareheaded, but in her best dress, holding the reins in a gloved hand, basket between her feet. Silent, expressionless, she may have been, but when she turned into the Lille-Calais road and met a string of English transports, limbers and wagons, it was noticeable that the Quartermaster-Sergeant, after glancing at her face, instead of shouting to her to get out of the way, turned in his saddle and shouted to the drivers, “Right o’ the road!” She came to the village and crossed the empty Grand’ Place, where the old houses stared unchanged over the notice-boards of the offices of the Head-quarters of an English Division, and the church, newly faced with red brick, showed the zeal of the pious Flemings. Turning sharply out of this, she mounted, at the snail pace of the old white horse, a steep street between little houses of people who had retired to live on about the equivalent of forty pounds English per annum (as people do in France). It ended in a great eighteenth-century iron grille, the entry to the château. The central gates stood open and she drove straight along a road deep between high banks covered with shrubs, which followed for some fifty yards the old line of the moat, until she came under the back part of the château where a broad terrace of gravel separated the basement offices from the kitchen garden. Leaving the old horse, with perfect confidence, looking down his nose into a laurel bush, Madeleine took her basket on her arm, and entered the great square kitchen.