, but we were not to expect the luxuries
of a hotel.

The farmer and I carried the ladies' hand-luggage upstairs into a
mysterious dim region, where all was clean and cold. I had a flickering,
candle-lit vision of a big white room, with an enormously high bedstead,
bare floor, a rug or two, a chair or two, a shrine, and a washhand-stand
with a knitted cover, one basin the size of a porridge-bowl containing a
thing like a milk-jug. Then I set down my burden and departed to wheel
the great helpless car into the farmyard, and wash my hands with
Hudson's soap in a trough under a pump outside the kitchen.

Meanwhile preparations for supper went on, and as I was hungrily hoping
for scraps when my betters should have finished, who should pop out but
that Angel to say that supper was ready, and would I eat with them! I
had been working _so_ hard and must be starved. If she had guessed how I
longed to kiss her she would have run away indoors much faster than she
did.

There was soup, chicken, an omelette, and cheese. Trust a
Frenchwoman--even the humblest--to turn out an excellent meal on the
shortest notice. Miss Randolph smiled and beamed on them, so that in
five minutes the farmer and his wife were her willing slaves. She was
delighted with the "adventure," as she called it, declaring that the
whole thing would be the greatest fun in the world. She was glad that
the horrid tyre had come off, as it gave her the chance, which she would
never have had otherwise, of studying French peasant life at first hand.
Aunt Mary was called in from outside and acquiesced, as she always did,
in the arrangements made by her impetuous niece; the farmer and I had
pushed the German car inside the gate and left it; but Talleyrand was
fussy about getting proper cover for his smart Pieper, and was not
satisfied until he had housed it in a dry barn near the house.

After supper I strolled out into the night, trying, with a pipe between
my lips, to think out the details of an alluring new plan which had
flashed into my mind.

"Flashed" there, do I say? Forced, rammed in, and pounded down expresses
it better. Will you believe it, during supper, that fellow--Eyelashes, I
mean--had had the audacity to urge upon Miss Randolph that she must now
continue the tour on his car!

I was smoking and fuming in the dark, in a corner down by the gateway,
when I heard a whisper of silk (I suppose it's linings; I'd know it at
the North Pole as hers, now), and