Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/408

402 pleasure to me to think you." It had been a large indication to meet; but if she hadn't met it what had she done, and how had their time together slipped along so smoothly, mild but not slow, and melting, liquefying, into his happy illusion of idleness? He could recognise, on the other hand, that he had probably not been without reason, in his prior, his restricted state, for keeping an eye on his liability to lapse from good faith.

He really continued in the picture—that being for himself his situation—all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was still, was indeed more than ever, upon him when, towards six o'clock, he found himself amicably engaged with a stout, white-capped, deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest village, a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and crookedness set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or before it—one couldn't say which; at the bottom, in particular, of the inn-garden. He had had other adventures before this; had kept along the height, after shaking off slumber; had admired, had almost coveted, another small old church, all steep roof and dim slate-colour without and all whitewash and paper flowers within; had lost his way and had found it again; had conversed with rustics who struck him perhaps a little more as men of the world than he had expected; had acquired at a bound a fearless facility in French; had had, as the afternoon waned, a watery bock, all pale and Parisian, in the café of the furthest village, which was not the biggest; and had all the while not once overstepped the oblong gilt frame. The frame had drawn itself out for him as much as you please; but that was just his luck. He had finally come down again to the valley, to keep within touch of stations and trains, turning his face to the quarter from which he had started; and thus it was that he had at last pulled up before the hostess of the "Cheval Blanc," who met him, with a rough readiness that was like the clatter of sabots over stones, on their common ground of a côtelette de veau a l'oseille and a subsequent lift. He had walked many miles and didn't know that he was tired; he only knew that he was amused, and even that, though he had been alone all day, he had never yet struck