is burrow in the thicket, a thicket of silence
from which I knew at any moment might break forth a murderous fire. It
grew colder and colder, I had to breathe lustily into the collar of my
jersey to keep out the chill. I began to envy the hare snug in his
burrow. Thus I held my vigil, and the night wore on.

Ah! my friend the cure! I mused. Was there ever such an indefatigable
sportsman? Lucky cure! He was not a prisoner, neither had he been
pressed into the customs patrol like a hired assassin. At that moment I
knew Monsieur le Cure was snug in his duck-blind for the night, a long
two miles from where I lay; warm, and comfortable, with every chance on
such a night to kill a dozen fat mallards before his daylight mass. What
would my friend Madame Alice de Breville, and that whole-souled fellow
Tanrade, think when I did not appear as I had promised, at madame's
chateau, to dine at eight? Cold as I was, I could not help chuckling
over the fact that it was no fault of mine.

I was a prisoner. Alice and Tanrade would dine together. It would be
then a dinner for two. I have never known a woman as discreet as Alice.
She had insisted that I dine with them. In Paris Alice might not have
insisted, but in the lost village, with so many old women with nothing
to talk about save other peoples' affairs! Lucky Tanrade!

I could see from where I lay the distant mass of trees screening her
chateau, and picture to myself my two dear friends _alone_. Their
chairs--now that my vacant one was the only witness--drawn close
together; he holding her soft, responsive little hand between the soup
and the fish, between the duck and the salad; then continuously over
their dessert and Burgundy--she whom he had held close to his big heart
that night after dinner in that once abandoned house of mine, when they
had gone out together into my courtyard and disappeared in the shadows
of the moonlight.

Dining alone! The very thing I had tried to bring about. But for the
stern brigadier we should have been that wretched number--three--to-night
at the chateau. Ah, you dear human children, are you conscious and
grateful that I am lying out like a vagabond, a prisoner, that you
may be alone?

I began to wonder, too, what the Essence of Selfishness, that spoiled
and adorable cat of mine, would think when it came her bedtime hour.
Would Suzette, in her anxiety over my absence, remember to give her the
saucer of warm milk? Yet I knew the Essence of Selfis