The hotel was at the higher end of the village and from its steps she could see down the narrow street to where the little church and its white cloaked sugar-loaf spire obscured the view and away to the right set clear of the village and each on the crest of a gentle slope, the hotels, four, five, big buildings, not unbeautiful with their peaked roofs and balconies and the brilliance of green shutters on their white faces. And even the largest, Mrs. Harcourt’s ‘hidjus big place’ recognisable by its difference, a huge square plaster box, patterned with rows and rows of uniform windows above which on its flat roof a high pole flaunted a flag limp in the motionless air, looked small and harmless, a dolls’ house dumped casually, lost in the waste of snow. If these hotels were full, there were in the village more visitors than natives. But where were they? The vast landscape was empty. From its thickly mantled fields came the smell of snow. Lost when she went down the street in a maze of fugitive scents within one pervading, and that seemed to compose the very air: the sweet deep smell of burning pinewood. Moving within it as the crowded little shop windows went by on either hand were the smells of dried apples and straw and a curious blending of faint odours that revealed themselves—when presently summoning an excuse for the excitement of shopping, at the cost of but a few of the multitude of small coins representing an English sovereign, she gained the inside of the third general store between the hotel and the church—as the familiar smell of mixed groceries; with a difference: clean smells, baked dry. No prevailing odour of moist bacon and mouldering cheese; of spilt paraffin and musty sacking, and things left undisturbed in corners. No dinginess. And though shelves and counter were crowded, every single thing gleamed and displayed itself with an air. But there were no Swiss biscuits. Only a double row of the familiar square tins from Reading, triumphantly displayed by the gaunt sallow-faced woman whose ringing voice was as disconcertingly at variance with her appearance as was her charmed manner with the eager cunning that sat in her eyes. She asked for soap and the woman set wide the door of an upright glass case in which were invitingly set forth little packets bearing names that in England were household words.