So once more that morning, watching Derry, I seemed to be watching, not the Derry actually by my side, but a Derry who had been a stripling when I had been in my middle twenties. For example, a troop of dragoons clattered past, in blue steel hats, dark blue tunics, red breeches, black boots; and I saw the sparkle of his eyes at the four red pennons they carried. Just so, for all I knew, his eyes had sparkled when he had first seen the sentries at the Horse Guards. We strolled on to the Porte St Louis, and under its arch he paused. He examined the portcullis-grooves, the remnants of hinges, the steep couloirs down which the stones had been rolled and the boiling water poured from the guard-room above. I don't know whether in his other boyhood he had known York or Sandwich, but I saw by his face that his memory reduplicated those old echoings, the clanging of iron, the hurtling of stones, the shouting of men within the ringing arch. Outside in the Petits Fosses it was the same. He peered into slits, glanced at the machicolations aloft, measured salients and re-entrants and dead-ground with his eyes. I think he saw that "bélier à griffes" again in use, the staggering storied sow pushed up to the walls by the horses and oxen in the hide-hung penthouse behind.... And this same man had seen modern war! He had flung the Mills and the "hairbrush," had worn a box-respirator, seen wire-netted gunpits and flame-throwing and the white puff-balls following the aeroplanes through the sky. Extraordinary, extraordinary! I could not get used to it.... At twelve o'clock I walked on to the station to meet Alec. His train was a few minutes late. It drew up on the farther set of rails. At Dinan one walks across on the level, and as I advanced to meet him I saw him appear round the engine. But not until a moment later did I see that he was followed by Julia Oliphant. She was dressed in travelling-tweeds, but it was not the tweeds that filled me with the instant conviction that she was departing and had come to say good-bye to Madge. It was rather something indefinable in her face. Nor had she come to corroborate my story. She and Alec had doubtless already got that over, if ever it could be got over. She greeted me with a faint smile, but without speaking. In fact I don't think that one of the three of us spoke during the seven or eight minutes it took us to reach the Poste. Once more something had happened about our terrace-table. Perhaps because of the slight lateness of Alec's train, added to the quarter of an hour we had already delayed our meal (for déjeuner at the Poste is at twelve), the only table capable of seating six had been made over to a party of visitors who would depart in little more than an hour by the vedette. This, however, seemed to suit Alec rather than otherwise. He took Madge by the arm. "Then you come over here," he said to her. "You've got till six o'clock to talk to Julia. I want a word with you first."