sincere kindliness that had made him a prince among head waiters. As I
shook hands with him his lips quivered and tears came to his eyes.
Flynn, standing beside the car, saluted with a welcoming grin.

"Very glad to see you, sorr. The trunk came this mornin' all right,
sorr, and we put it in your room."

I bade Antoine join me in the back seat that he might the more easily
bring me up to date as to affairs on the estate.

"It must be a little slow up here after the years you lived in town," I
suggested, "but of course you're all old friends."

"Well, yes; all friends," he acquiesced, but with so little enthusiasm
that I glanced at him quickly. He pretended to be absorbed in the flying
landscape at the moment. Flynn, I noticed, was giving ear to our
conversation from the wheel.

"It was sad, very sad, Mr. Bashford passing away so far from home, sir.
It was a great shock. And he had looked forward for years to a quiet
life abroad. It must have been ten years ago he first mentioned his hope
of retiring to Japan."

Uncle Bash had given me no such forecast of his intentions, and I felt
humble before this proof of Antoine's greater intimacy. Once at the
beginning of our acquaintance, when I had complimented Antoine on his
English, he explained that he was born in England of French parents. His
father had been chef and his mother housekeeper for an American banker
who lived for many years in London. Antoine's speech was that of a
well-trained English upper servant, and I imagined that in his youth he
had taken some English butler as his model. He used to pretend that he
knew French very imperfectly, and I was surprised when he now addressed
me quite fluently in that language.

"You have been with the armies of dear France," he remarked. "The war is
very dreadful. My parents were of Verdun; it grieves me to know of the
suffering in the land of my people."

As I replied sympathetically in French I saw Flynn straighten himself at
the wheel with an impatient fling of his head. Antoine indicated him
with a contemptuous nod: "Married Elsie, the German woman who worked in
the linen-room at the Tyringham! This has caused some trouble, and
there is a pantry girl, Gretchen, who was ill a long time before the
master left, and he sent her here for the country air. She is a little
devil with her dear Fatherland."

I laughed at the old fellow's gravity and earnestness. That the war
should be making itself felt on the quiet acres