oloured
sails, the way the trees make it look now."

"Wouldn't it be great to go to sea?" said Randolph, looking straight
into the moon, "an' get out of this slaughter-house. It's nice to see
the war, but I have no intention of taking up butchery as a
profession.... There is too much else to do in the world."

They walked slowly along the road talking of the sea, and Martin told
how when he was a little kid he'd had an uncle who used to tell him
about the Vikings and the Swan Path, and how one of the great moments of
his life had been when he and a friend had looked out of their window in
a little inn on Cape Cod one morning and seen the sea and the swaying
gold path of the sun on it, stretching away, beyond the horizon.

"Poor old life," he said. "I'd expected to do so much with you." And
they both laughed, a little bitterly.

They were strolling past a large farmhouse that stood like a hen among
chicks in a crowd of little outbuildings. A man in the road lit a
cigarette and Martin recognised him in the orange glare of the match.

"Monsieur Merrier!" He held out his hand. It was the aspirant he had
drunk beer with weeks ago at Brocourt.

"Hah! It's you!"

"So you are en repos here, too?"

"Yes, indeed. But you two come in and see us; we are dying of the
blues."

"We'd love to stop in for a second."

A fire smouldered in the big hearth of the farmhouse kitchen, sending a
little irregular fringe of red light out over the tiled floor. At the
end of the room towards the door three men were seated round a table,
smoking. A candle threw their huge and grotesque shadows on the floor
and on the whitewashed walls, and lit up the dark beams of that part of
the ceiling. The three men got up and everyone shook hands, filling the
room with swaying giant shadows. Champagne was brought and tin cups and
more candles, and the Americans were given the two most comfortable
chairs.

"It's such a find to have Americans who speak French," said a bearded
man with unusually large brilliant eyes. He had been introduced as Andre
Dubois, "a very terrible person," had added Merrier, laughing. The cork
popped out of the bottle he had been struggling with.

"You see, we never can find out what you think about things.... All we
can do is to be sympathetically inane, and _vive les braves allies_ and
that sort of stuff."

"I doubt if we Americans do think," said Martin.

"Cigarettes, who wants some cigarettes?" cried Lully, a small m