To enter the primly and plushily furnished salon, bearing the tray, and to set out the cups and glasses and bottles was an ordeal which he went through with the automatic rigidity of a highly trained London footman, looking neither to right nor left. He had a vague impression of a queenly figure reclining comfortably in an arm chair, haloed by a little cloud of cigarette smoke. He retired, finished his work in the pantry, swallowed a little food, changed his things and went out. Instinct led him along the quays and through the narrow, old-world streets to the patch of yellow light before the Café de l’Univers. But there he halted, suddenly disinclined to enter. Something new and amazing had come into his life—he could not yet tell what—discordant with the commonplace of the familiar company. He looked through the space left between the edge of the blind and the jamb of the window and saw Beuzot, the professor at the Ecole Normale, playing backgammon with Monsieur Callot, the postmaster; and a couple of places away from them was visible the square-headed old Monsieur Viriot, smiting his left palm with his right fist. The excellent old man always did that when he inveighed against the government. To-night Martin cared little about the Government of the French Republic; still less for backgammon. He had a nostalgia for unknown things and an absurd impulse to walk abroad to find them beneath the moon and stars. Obeying the impulse, he retraced his steps along the quays and struck the main-road past the habitations of the rock dwellers. He walked for a couple of miles between rocks casting jagged shadows and a calm, misty plain without finding anything, until, following a laborious, zig-zag course, a dissolute quarryman of his acquaintance in incapable charge of a girl child of five, lurched into him and laid the clutch of a drowning mariner upon his shoulder. “Monsieur Martin,” said he. “It is the good God who has sent you.” “Boucabeille,” said Martin—for that was the name of the miscreant—“you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” “You need not tell me, Monsieur Martin,” replied Boucabeille.