Like Peter he denied instantly. No, he was alone, taking his food where he could find it. In her Gaulish fashion she twitted him with having families scattered along the highroads of France. This delicate impeachment he again denied, whereupon the lady, with a laughing glance out of dark eyes, and an ‘_allons donc!_’ thrust an arch elbow into his ribs. And when her husband claimed her attention, he talked to the old farmer about weather and wheat and apples and _rillettes_, the sausages that were served to them, and all the other wonders of La Beauce. And Cosmo Paradyne knew that for three months he had been leading this life of open air and earth and primitive interests, and, in some odd way, had fallen victim to its fascination. [Illustration: “TIENS, SHE HAD A HUSBAND!”] On a hurried, worried holiday some years before he had visited Chartres with his wife, and had made his intellectual man’s pilgrimage to the cathedral. Be it insisted on here, by the way, that no haggis was more tightly stuffed with giblets and oatmeal than was Cosmo Paradyne with knowledge. From pre-Winchester days onwards he had been the paragon of examinees. His career had been one of meteoric brilliance. In his course he had made himself easy master of three foreign languages, German, Italian and French; his musical ear, his one æsthetic gift, had caught and assimilated the accents; after a day or two among a foreign peasantry he could reproduce their intonations, and his marvellous memory could store the patois words which he picked up.... So was he master of the historical or archæological side of the arts of painting and architecture. His mind had ever been receptive of facts, and, tenaciously holding them, of co-ordinating them into an imperishable crystallization. With such mental qualities, is it to be wondered at that, at forty-two, he was one of the leaders of the Chancery Bar? ‘What a judge the little devil will make when he’s sick of making money!’ said his brethren. On his previous visit therefore to the Cathedral of Chartres, Cosmo Paradyne, drawing from the vast stores of his learning, gave his wife an accurate account of the history of the fabric. He showed her that portion which dated from the middle of the thirteenth century, the stained glass of the same period, the Renaissance screen, the difference between the one twelfth-century spire and the other of the sixteenth century. The Cathedral was, to him, an agglomeration of fascinating facts. Martha had listened distractedly and eventually had replied: ‘Yes. That’s very interesting; but I think it’s rather pretty, all the same.’