He laughed. "Oh, that's all right--I got it back again--don't be afraid I'm going to claim yours. But the way I lost it--found it--the whole thing--was rather curious. I've never been able to explain it. I wonder if you could?" I answered that I certainly couldn't till I'd heard it, whereupon Loder, taking up the silver case again and holding it in his hand as he talked, began: "This happened in Provence, when I was about as old as Marsham there--and every bit as romantic. I was there with Carroll--you remember poor old Carroll and what a blade of a boy he was--as romantic as four Marshams rolled into one. (Excuse me, Marsham, won't you? It's a romantic tale, you see, or at least the setting is.) ... We were in Provence, Carroll and I; twenty-four or thereabouts; romantic, as I say; and--and this happened. "And it happened on the top of a whole lot of other things, you must understand, the things that do happen when you're twenty-four. If it hadn't been Provence, it would have been somewhere else, I suppose, nearly, if not quite as good; but this was Provence, that smells (as you might say) of twenty-four as it smells of argelasse and wild lavender and broom.... "We'd had the dickens of a walk of it, just with knapsacks--had started somewhere in the Ardèche and tramped south through the vines and almonds and olives--Montélimar, Orange, Avignon, and a fortnight at that blanched skeleton of a town, Les Baux. We'd nothing to do, and had gone just where we liked, or rather just where Carroll had liked; and Carroll had had the _De Bello Gallico_ in his pocket, and had had a notion, I fancy, of taking in the whole ground of the Roman conquest--I remember he lugged me off to some place or other, Pourrières I believe its name was, because--I forget how many thousands--were killed in a river-bed there, and they stove in the water-casks so that if the men wanted water they'd have to go forward and fight for it. And then we'd gone on to Arles, where Carroll had fallen in love with everything that had a bow of black velvet in her hair, and after that Tarascon, Nîmes, and so on, the usual round--I won't bother you with that. In a word, we'd had two months of it, eating almonds and apricots from the trees, watching the women at the communal washing-fountains under the dark plane-trees, singing _Magali_ and the _Qué Cantes_, and Carroll yarning away all the time about Caesar and Vercingetorix and Dante, and trying to learn Provençal so that he could read the stuff in the _Journal des Félibriges_ that he'd never have looked at if it had been in English....