_mèche_--what do you call it----?" "Strand?" "Yes--strand of her hair across her face. She let it blow and laughed and did not move. Didn't I say she was a little witch? If there's a Provençal ever born who would not have kissed a girl under such provocation I should like to have his mummy. I kissed her. She kept on laughing. I kissed her again. I kissed her four times. At the beginning of the fourth kiss out came her father from the postcard shop. He waited till the end of it and then announced himself. He announced himself in such ungentlemanly terms that I was forced to let the whole party, including the adorable little witch, go on to Pau by themselves, while I betook my broken heart to the Café de l'Univers." "And there you found consolation?" "I told my sad tale. Amélie listened and called the manager to take charge of the _comptoir_, and poured herself out a glass of Frontignan. Amélie always drinks Frontignan when her heart is touched. I came the next day and the next. It was pouring with rain day and night--and Carcassonne in rain is like Hades with its furnaces put out by human tears--and the Café de l'Univers like a little warm corner of Paradise stuck in the midst of it." "And so that's how it happened?" "That's how it happened. _Ma foi!_ When a lady asks a _galant homme_ to marry her, what is he to do? Besides, did I not say that the Café de l'Univers was the most prosperous one in Carcassonne? I'm afraid you English, my dear friend, have such sentimental ideas about marriage. Now, we in France----_Attendez, attendez!_" He suddenly broke off his story, lurched forward, and gripped the back of the front seat. "To the right, man, to the right!" he cried excitedly to McKeogh. We had reached the point where the straight road from Aigues-Mortes branches into a fork, one road going to Montpellier, the other to Nîmes. Montpellier being to the west, McKeogh had naturally taken the left fork. "To the right!" shouted Aristide. McKeogh pulled up and turned his head with a look of protesting inquiry. I intervened with a laugh. "You're wrong in your geography, M. Pujol. Besides, there is the signpost staring you in the face. This is the way to Montpellier." "But, my dear, heaven-sent friend, I no more want to go to Montpellier than you do!" he cried. "Montpellier is the last place on earth I desire to visit. You want to go to Nîmes, and so do I. To the right, chauffeur." "What shall I do, sir?" asked McKeogh. I was utterly bewildered. I turned to the goat-skin-clad, pointed-bearded, bright-eyed Aristide, who, sitting bolt upright in the car, with his hands stretched out, looked like a parody of the god Pan in a hard felt hat. "You don't want to go to Montpellier?" I asked, stupidly. "No--ten thousand times no; not for a king's ransom." "But your four thousand francs--your meeting Mme. Gougasse's train--your getting on to Carcassonne?"