ellis bristling with spikes. A
spring leapt from place to place and fell in cascades to the bottom of
the rocks decked with wild flowers, moss, lichen and maiden-hair ferns.

*
* *

Morestal picked a great armful of flowers, laid waste his rose-garden,
sacrificed all the Gloires de Dijon of which he was so proud and
returned to the drawing-room, where he himself arranged the bunches in
large glass vases.

The room, a sort of hall occupying the centre of the house, with beams
of timber showing and a huge chimney covered with gleaming brasses, the
room was bright and cheerful and open at both fronts: to the east, on
the terrace, by a long bay; to the west, by two windows, on the garden,
which it overlooked from the height of a first floor.

The walls were covered with War Office maps, Home Office maps, district
maps. There was an oak gun-rack with twelve rifles, all alike and of the
latest pattern. Beside it, nailed flat to the wall and roughly stitched
together, were three dirty, worn, tattered strips of bunting, blue,
white and red.

"They look very well: what do you say?" he asked, when he had finished
arranging the flowers, as though his wife had been in the room. "And
now, I think, a good pipe ..."

He took out his tobacco-pouch and matches and, crossing the terrace,
went and leant against the stone balustrade that edged it.

Hills and valleys mingled in harmonious curves, all green, in places,
with the glad green of the meadows, all dark, in others, with the
melancholy green of the firs and larches.

At thirty or forty feet below him ran the road that leads from
Saint-Elophe up to the Old Mill. It skirted the walls and then dipped
down again to the Etang-des-Moines, or Monks' Pool, of which it followed
the left bank. Breaking off suddenly, it narrowed into a rugged path
which could be seen in the distance, standing like a ladder against a
rampart, and which plunged into a narrow pass between two mountains
wilder in appearance and rougher in outline than the ordinary Vosges
landscape. This was the Col du Diable, or Devil's Pass, situated at a
distance of sixteen hundred yards from the Old Mill, on the same level.

A few buildings clung to one of the sides of the pass: these belonged to
Saboureux's Farm. From Saboureux's Farm to the Butte-aux-Loups, or
Wolves' Knoll, which you saw on the left, you could make out or imagine
the frontier by