, and as these receded, the landscape
flattened out into a bleak, morose plain.

What lives were lived yonder in that low grange, crouching under the
five melancholy poplars? An hour later father and son would go forth in
that treacherous quaking boat, lying amid the sedge, and cast their net
into one of those black pools. But these pictures of primeval
simplicities which the landscape evoked were not in accord with a
journey toward love and pleasure. Evelyn and Owen did not dare to
contrast their lives with those of the Picardy peasants, and that they
should see not roses and sunshine, but a broken and abandoned boat amid
the sedge, and mournful hills faintly outlined against the heavy,
lowering sky seemed to them significant. They watched the filmy,
diffused, opal light of the dawn, and they were filled with nervous
expectation. The man who appeared at the end of the plain in his
primitive guise of a shepherd driving his flock towards the hard thin
grass of the uplands seemed menacing and hostile. His tall felt hat
seemed like a helmet in the dusk, his crook like a lance, and Owen
understood that the dawn was the end of the truce, that the battle with
Nature was about to begin again. At that moment she was thinking that if
she had done wrong in leaving home, the sin was worth all the scruples
she might endure, and she rejoiced that she endured none. He folded her
in his rug. The train seemed to stop, and the names of the stations
sounded dim in her ears. Her perceptions rose and sank, and, as they
sank, the villa engarlanded, of which Owen had spoken, seemed there. Its
gates, though unbarred, were impassable. She thought she was shaking
them, but when she opened her eyes it was Owen telling her that they had
passed the fortifications, that they were in Paris.

He had brought with him only his dressing-bag, so they were not detained
at the Customs. His valet was following with the rest of his luggage,
and as soon as she had had a few hours' sleep, he would take her to
different shops. She clung on to his arm. Paris seemed very cold and
cheerless, and she did not like the tall, haggard houses, nor the
slattern waiter arranging chairs in front of an early cafe, nor the
humble servant clattering down the pavement in wooden shoes. She saw
these things with tired eyes, and she was dimly aware of a decrepit
carriage drawn by two decrepit horses, and then of a great hotel built
about a courtyard. She heard Owen arguing about