"Will you wait in your room till I come?" "Back to England?" "I don't know. Will you wait for me in your room?" "Tell me one other thing, sir," he pleaded; "just her name----" "Her name's Jennie." He received it as if it had been a costly gift. "Jennie, Jennie----" he breathed softly. "You'll wait for me?" "Of course, sir. Thank you, George." "Then I'll say----" But I could not get out the words "Good night." How did I know what the night was going to be for him? For it happened in the night.... I left him standing by the earth-wall, with the lights still twinkling at sea and the low glare of Fréhel in the sky behind him. Four seconds, eleven seconds, four times a minute---- "Jennie!" I heard his hushed, rapt voice as I turned away. V "_Le_ Por-r-rt! _Le_ Por-r-rt!" Only an old woman with white streamers and a basket descended from the tram, but instinctively I turned my head to look at the flowery bank on which I had sat so few hours before. It was a sparkling morning, with an intense blue sky, high white clouds and singing larks. The fields of flowering sarrasin were white, cream, pink, deep russet; and far away the grey-green boscage receded into misty blue, unbroken by walls or fences, that contradictory communal undulation of a country where individualism is at its most intense, holdings small, and a ditch or a bank you could stride over fencing enough. But I was too anxious to be able to admire. At the best it looked as if I should have to assume complete responsibility for him and so cut my visit to the Airds abruptly short. At the worst--but I put the worst from me. "Allez! Roulez!" With the sound of a tank going into action the tram clattered forward to St Lunaire. Up the steep street, and a swerve past the acres of tennis-courts that had once been grass. The huge six-acre cage was already full of players, and I thought of Jennie Aird. Then past the magasins and the long café, with half-clad young Frenchmen punting a ball and walking on their hands in the strip of meadow opposite. The Casino, the hotels, and then a steep planted avenue that seemed to end in the air. Then a rush and another swerve, and out on to the wide expanse of tussocky links, grey and fawn sandhills, and turf gemmed with a myriad tiny flowers. His hotel was within a biscuit's-toss of the terminus. It stood by the roadside, and its front consisted of a built-out structure of glass, within which a couple of Breton girls with tight hair, string-soled shoes, and the physique of middle-weight boxers, were laying a dozen small tables for _déjeuner_. A lad dressed precisely as Derry had been dressed was delivering lifebuoys of bread, and knives clattered in baskets, and two-foot-high stacks of coloured plates were being carried in. "M'sieu' Arnaud?" I inquired of one of the string-slippered Amazons. "M'sieu' n'est pas déscendu--si vour voulez monter au deuxième, M'sieu'."