e affairs. "I am a sleeping partner at all times
except the vintage, when I awake and ride round among the growers, to
test their growth."

It was too early yet for these journeys, for the grapes were hardly
ripe. But any one who wished to move from place to place must needs do
so in the saddle in a country where land is so valuable that the width
of a road is grudged, and bridle-ways are deemed good enough for the
passage of the long and narrow carts that carry wine.

Ever since their somewhat precipitate departure from the Villa Cordouan
at Royan, Dormer Colville and Barebone had been in company. They had
stayed together, in one friend's house or another. Sometimes they
enjoyed the hospitality of a chateau, and at others put up with the
scanty accommodation of a priest's house or the apartment of a retired
military officer, in one of those little towns of provincial France
at which the cheap journalists of Paris are pleased to sneer without
ceasing.

They avoided the large towns with extraordinary care.

"Why should we go to towns," asked Colville, jovially, "when we have
business in the country and the sun is still high in the sky?"

"Yes," he would reply to the questions of an indiscreet
fellow-traveller, at table or on the road. "Yes; I am a buyer of wine.
We are buyers of wine. We are travelling from place to place to watch
the growth. For the wine is hidden in the grape, and the grape is
ripening."

And, as often as not, the chance acquaintance of an inn dejeuner would
catch the phrase and repeat it thoughtfully.

"Ah! is that so?" he would ask, with a sudden glance at Dormer
Colville's companion, who had hitherto passed unobserved as the silent
subordinate of a large buyer; learning his trade, no doubt. "The grape
is ripening. Good!"

And as sure as he seemed to be struck with this statement of a
self-evident fact, he would, in the next few minutes, bring the numeral
"nineteen"--tant bien que mal--into his conversation.

"With nineteen days of sun, the vintage will be upon us," he would say;
or, "I have but nineteen kilometres more of road before me to-day."

Indeed, it frequently happened that the word came in very
inappropriately, as if tugged heroically to the front by a clumsy
conversationalist.

There is no hazard of life so certain to discover sympathy or antagonism
as travel--a fact which points to the wisdom of beginning married life
with a journey. The majority of people like to know the w