d established themselves,
with Mary's nurse and a French _bonne_ to look after them; would find
the green wooden shutters drawn close; the dejeuner waiting for them
in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating from the
kitchen, where the two maids kept up a humble but perpetual warfare.
Then afterward Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be tumbled
into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep, till the
patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated one story
from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let
loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless _salon_, would lie back
in the rickety arm-chair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing,
till dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another _comedie
humaine_ unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in the contriving optimist
mind.

Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it
could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the College
de France, as good as any at Etretat, a tired journalist or two, and
a sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among
them, _more suo_, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the
most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands
through many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new
acquaintances.

But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and
mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which
was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed
to have climbed the bean-stalk into a new world. The rich Normandy
country lay all around them--the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of
white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees
which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On
the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren
even for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half
tangled grass and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their
own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the
patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze,
there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them
poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded
happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.

One evening they were sitting in the warm d