g taken by some rough,
selfish-looking commercial travellers, who were having an early dinner
in a hot and smelly _salle a manger_, with every breath of air
religiously excluded.

I thought that without being fussy I might draw the general attention to
myself. I announced a wrist, and demanded a surgeon lest I had cracked a
bone. Brown vanished like a pantomine demon, but returned almost
immediately with a long face, and the intelligence that Le Beausset had
neither surgeon nor resident doctor. There was no vehicle, not even a
bicycle, to be had for love or money at this time of day, but he would
make all haste to Toulon and send back a competent man. The worst of it
was there might be delay, as it was about ten miles to Toulon. Halfway
between Le Beausset and the big town was a small one called Ollioules,
and there, it appeared, one could take an electric tram into Toulon; but
it was a long way for a doctor to come, and it might be several hours
before he could arrive.

"Then I'll go to Toulon with you," said I. "I don't feel as if I could
stand much waiting; the walk will take my mind off the pain, and I can
have my wrist attended to the minute I get there."

Instantly Aunt Mary burst into a cataract of objections, and I only
dammed the flood (quite in the proper sense of the word, because, like
Marjorie Fleming, I was "most unusual calm; I did not give a single
damn") by suggesting that, once in Toulon, I might send back a
comfortable carriage and engage rooms in a good hotel for us all for the
night.

"Well, I can't and won't stay here alone, that's flat," pronounced my
dear aunt; and despite all her lectures against "liberty, fraternity,
and equality" in my treatment of poor Brown, she was willing to let me
go unchaperoned save by him, for the sake of retaining Jimmy Payne's
protecting presence herself. As for Jimmy, it was easy to see that he
didn't like the idea at all; but he had jarred himself a good deal in
his eccentric fall, and evidently funked another tramp. He had limped
ostentatiously every step of the way to Le Beausset. Brown was afraid
that I wasn't up to the walk, but I assured him it would be much less
uncomfortable than indefinite waiting, and I think he saw by my face
that I was right. After all our delay it was only half-past five when we
set off, and would scarcely have been thoroughly dark if it hadn't been
for the clouds which had been boiling up from the west all over the sky.

I had no