he broke off and
looked away.

Peter gripped her hand tightly. "Don't, little girl," he said. "Let's
forget for to-day. Look at those primroses; they're the first I've seen.
Aren't they heavenly?"

They ran into Caudebec in good time, and lunched at an hotel overlooking
the river, with great enthusiasm. To Peter it was utterly delicious to
have her by him. She was as gay as she could possibly be, and made fun
over everything. Sitting daintily before him, her daring, unconventional
talk carried him away. She chose the wine, and after _dejeuner_ sat with
her elbows on the table, puffing at a cigarette, her brown eyes alight
with mischief, apparently without a thought for to-morrow.

"Oh, I say," she said, "do look at that party in the corner. The old
Major's well away, and the girl'll have a job to keep him in hand, I
wonder where they're from? Rouen, perhaps; there was a car at the door.
What do you think of the girl?"

Peter glanced back. "No better than she ought to be," he said.

"No, I don't suppose so, but they are gay, these French girls. I don't
wonder men like them. And they have a hard time. I'd give them a leg up
any day if I could. I can't, though, so if ever you get a chance do it
for me, will you?"

Peter assented. "Come on," he said. "Finish that glass if you think you
can, and let's get out."

"Here's the best, then, I've done. What are we going to see?"

For a couple of hours they wandered round the old town, with its narrow
streets and even fifteenth-century houses, whose backs actually leaned
over the swift little river that ran all but under the place to the
Seine. They penetrated through an old mill to its back premises, and
climbed precariously round the water-wheel to reach a little moss-grown
platform from which the few remaining massive stones of the Norman wall
and castle could still be seen. The old abbey kept them a good while,
Julie interested Peter enormously as they walked about its cool aisles,
and tried to make out the legends of its ancient glass. She had nothing
of that curious kind of shyness most people have in a church, and that he
would certainly have expected of her. She joked and laughed a little in
it--at a queer row of mutilated statues packed into a kind of chapel to
keep quiet out of the way till wanted, at the vivid red of the Red Sea
engulfing Pharaoh and all his host--but not in the least irreverently. He
recalled a saying of a book he had once read in which a Roman