n, that we both
tried to answer at once. And his delight and envy!... What! In England
did the young men see the young women of their own class without
restraint--the sisters of their friends _meme_--even at the house? Was it
permitted that they drank tea with them in the afternoon, or went without
invitation to pass the _soiree_?... He had all the later Prevosts in his
room, he told us (I don't doubt he had the earlier ones also); Prevost
and the Disestablishment between them must be playing the mischief
with the convent system of education for young girls; and our young man
was--what d'you call it?--'Co-ed'--co-educationalist--by Jove, yes!... He
seemed to marvel that we should have left a country so blessed as England
to visit his dusty, wild-lavender-smelling, girl-less Provence.... You
don't know half your luck, Marsham....

"Well, we talked after this fashion--we'd left the dining-room of the
restaurant and had planted ourselves on a bench outside with Rangon
between us--when Rangon suddenly looked at his watch and said it was time
he was off to see this agent of his. Would we take a walk, he asked us,
and meet him again there? he said.... But as his agent lived in the
direction of his own home, we said we'd meet him at the house in an hour
or so. Off he went, envying every Englishman who stepped, I don't
doubt.... I told you how old--how young--we were.... Heigho!...

"Well, off goes Rangon, and Carroll and I got up, stretched ourselves,
and took a walk. We walked a mile or so, until it began to get pretty
dark, and then turned; and it was as we came into the blackness of one of
these cypress hedges that the thing I'm telling you of happened. The
hedge took a sharp turn at that point; as we came round the angle we saw
a couple of women's figures hardly more than twenty yards ahead--don't
know how they got there so suddenly, I'm sure; and that same moment I
found my foot on something small and white and glimmering on the grass.

"I picked it up. It was a handkerchief--a woman's--embroidered--

"The two figures ahead of us were walking in our direction; there was
every probability that the handkerchief belonged to one of them; so we
stepped out....

"At my 'Pardon, madame,' and lifted hat one of the figures turned her
head; then, to my surprise, she spoke in English--cultivated English.
I held out the handkerchief. It belonged to the elder lady of the two,
the one who had spoken, a very gentle-voiced old lady,