The next day was still queerer. Skene wanted what he called “a day in the country.” Madeleine had no idea what he might mean, her notions of a holiday being confined to Church Festivals. She went with him, however, down the Seine Valley, as far as the regulations permitted. She gathered he once had regular haunts here, had gone by steamer with companions. She taunted him laughingly with having been one to “rigoler” in his youth. She began to suspect that he was much richer than his worn khaki and careful trench habits made apparent. He took her to a well-known beauty spot, all shuttered and sad with war and winter, roused the proprietor and persuaded him to give them food and drink in the mournfulness of the dismantled salle à manger. The proprietor, like so many others, had lost an only son. It took a lot of gentleness and some of Skene’s Expeditionary Force canteen cigarettes to thaw him. But gradually he expanded into the graveyard interest of his kind. What were the trenches like? Were the dead buried properly? Would one find their graves? Skene told all he could, painted a true picture as far as he could, exaggerating no horror, slurring over none of the stark facts. The old man was appeased. He liked to know. So his son was lying like that, was he, amid the Meuse hillocks! Madeleine took no part in the conversation, but sat looking at Skene, totally uninterested in what he was saying, enjoying the masculinity of his movements and gestures. She was beginning to be curious about the one thing that ever aroused her speculation. What was this man’s position in life? The men talked on into the winter dusk, the “patron” offering liqueurs and cigars. She and Skene missed their train back and had to walk to a neighboring depôt, and get seats on an army lorry. Skene tipped the driver and Madeleine saw the man’s face. That night, as they lay side by side in the sober companionship that both of them felt so right and justifiable, she asked him of his home. She was somewhat astonished at the result. He talked for twenty minutes, and was all the time incomprehensible to her. The old house in the Cathedral Close, the hereditary sinecure descending in the one family--the semi-public school, wholly leisured-class prejudices and scruples--the circle of maiden aunts living on railway dividends--the pet animals--the social functions--made her pucker her smooth, regular forehead with complete mystification. She could make nothing of it except that every one in England was rolling in money. * * * * *