"As you, no doubt, know, it's a restricted sort of life in some respects that a young _vigneron_ lives in those parts, and it was as we reached the house that Rangon remembered something--or he might have been trying to tell us as we came along for all I know, and not been able to get a word in edgeways for Carroll and his Provençal. It seemed that his mother was away from home for some days--apologies of the most profound, of course; our host was the soul of courtesy, though he did try to get at us a bit later.... We expressed our polite regrets, naturally; but I didn't quite see at first what difference it made. I only began to see when Rangon, with more apologies, told us that we should have to go back to Darbisson for dinner. It appeared that when Madame Rangon went away for a few days she dispersed the whole of the female side of her establishment also, and she'd left her son with nobody to look after him except an old man we'd seen in the yard mending one of these double-cylindered sulphur-sprinklers they clap across the horse's back and drive between the rows of vines.... Rangon explained all this as we stood in the hall drinking an _apéritif_--a hall crowded with oak furniture and photographs and a cradle-like bread-crib and doors opening to right and left to the other rooms of the ground floor. He had also, it seemed, to ask us to be so infinitely obliging as to excuse him for one hour after dinner--our postcard had come unexpectedly, he said, and already he had made an appointment with his agent about the _vendange_ for the coming autumn.... We, begged him, of course, not to allow us to interfere with his business in the slightest degree. He thanked us a thousand times. "'But though we dine in the village, we will take our own wine with us,' he said, 'a wine _surfin_--one of my wines--you shall see--' "Then he showed us round his place--I forget how many hundreds of acres of vines, and into the great building with the presses and pumps and casks and the huge barrel they call the thunderbolt--and about seven o'clock we walked back to Darbisson to dinner, carrying our wine with us. I think the restaurant we dined in was the only one in the place, and our gaillard of a host--he was a straight-backed, well-set-up chap, with rather fine eyes--did us on the whole pretty well. His wine certainly was good stuff, and set our tongues going....