l land, this beautiful people,
this beautiful omelette; gold poplars, blue-green vineyards, wet,
scarlet vine leaves, rain dripping into the court, fragrant
darkness... sleep, stronger than all.

XIII

The woodland path was deep in leaves. Claude and David were lying
on the dry, springy heather among the flint boulders. Gerhardt,
with his Stetson over his eyes, was presumably asleep. They were
having fine weather for their holiday. The forest rose about this
open glade like an amphitheatre, in golden terraces of
horse chestnut and beech. The big nuts dropped velvety and brown,
as if they had been soaked in oil, and disappeared in the dry
leaves below. Little black yew trees, that had not been visible
in the green of summer, stood out among the curly yellow brakes.
Through the grey netting of the beech twigs, stiff holly bushes
glittered.

It was the Wheeler way to dread false happiness, to feel cowardly
about being fooled. Since he had come back, Claude had more than
once wondered whether he took too much for granted and felt more
at home here than he had any right to feel. The Americans were
prone, he had observed, to make themselves very much at home, to
mistake good manners for good-will. He had no right to doubt the
affection of the Jouberts, however; that was genuine and
personal,--not a smooth surface under which almost any shade of
scorn might lie and laugh... was not, in short, the
treacherous "French politeness" by which one must not let oneself
be taken in. Merely having seen the season change in a country
gave one the sense of having been there for a long time. And,
anyway, he wasn't a tourist. He was here on legitimate business.

Claude's sprained ankle was still badly swollen. Madame Joubert
was sure he ought not to move about on it at all, begged him to
sit in the garden all day and nurse it. But the surgeon at the
front had told him that if he once stopped walking, he would have
to go to the hospital. So, with the help of his host's best
holly-wood cane, he limped out into the forest every day. This
afternoon he was tempted to go still farther. Madame Joubert had
told him about some caves at the other end of the wood,
underground chambers where the country people had gone to live in
times of great misery, long ago, in the English wars. The English
wars; he could not remember just how far back they were,--but
long enough to make one feel comfortable. As for him, perhaps he
would never go home a