allowing the animals to snatch delicious _hors d'oeuvres_
from the bushes as they passed, but to-day Finois was in the depths of
gloom. There was no grey Souris, no spectacled Fanny-anny to cheer him
on the way, and if he reached out a wistful mouth towards a branch, he
was hurried past it. How would we feel, I asked myself, if, with the
inner man clamouring, we were driven remorselessly along a road
decked on either side with exquisitely appointed tables, set out with
all our favourite dishes, to be had for nothing--never once allowed to
stop for a crumb of _pate de foie gras_, or a bit of chicken in aspic?
Yet asking myself this, I had no mercy on Finois.

We stopped for lunch at a queer auberge, in an abortive village
appropriately named Les Deserts, where the highroad for Chambery
began. An outer room roughly flagged with stone, was kitchen, nursery,
and family living-room in one. It swarmed with children, and was
presided over by two of Macbeth's witches, who were not separated from
their cauldrons. I took them to be rival mothers-in-law, and they
could have taught Innocentina some choice new expressions valuable to
test upon donkeys or other heretics; but they sent me a steaming bowl
of excellent coffee, when I half expected poison; fried me a couple of
eggs with crisp brown lace round the edges, and took for my benefit,
from one of the shelves that lined the nursery wall, the newest of a
hundred loaves of hard black bread.

I ventured to ask a down-trodden daughter-in-law of the Ladies of the
Cauldrons, whether a very young gentleman, and an older but still
all-young woman, with two donkeys, had stopped at the auberge some
hours earlier.

The spiritless one shook her head. But no. The only other customers of
the house thus far had been the postman and two soldiers. The party
might have passed. She and her parents were too busy to take note of
what went on outside. A faint chill of desolation touched me. It would
have been cheering to have news of the Boy and his cavalcade _en
route_.

By three o'clock Chambery was well in sight, lying far below us as we
wound down from mountain heights, and looking, from our point of view,
in position something like an inferior Aosta. It basked in a great
sun-swept plain, and away to the left a lateral valley, dimly blue,
opened towards Modane and the Mont Cenis. Descending, we found the
resemblance carried on by a few ancient chateaux and fortified
farmhouses, and as we ha