hesitation, 'it looks like it since
I'm with my wife.'

The lunch was exquisite: the omelette overdone, the sausages too greasy,
and the bread so hard that he had to cut it into fingers for Christine
lest she should hurt her wrist. They emptied two bottles of wine, and
began a third, becoming so gay and noisy that they ended by feeling
bewildered in the long room, where they partook of the meal all alone.
She, with her cheeks aflame, declared that she was tipsy; it had never
happened to her before, and she thought it very funny. Oh! so funny, and
she burst into uncontrollable laughter.

'Let us get a breath of air,' she said at last.

'Yes, let's take a stroll. We must start back at four o'clock; so we
have three hours before us.'

They went up the village of Bennecourt, whose yellow houses straggle
along the river bank for about a couple of thousand yards. All the
villagers were in the fields; they only met three cows, led by a little
girl. He, with an outstretched arm, told her all about the locality;
seemed to know whither he was going, and when they had reached the last
house--an old building, standing on the bank of the Seine, just opposite
the slopes of Jeufosse--turned round it, and entered a wood of oak
trees. It was like the end of the world, roofed in with foliage, through
which the sun alone penetrated in narrow tongues of flame. And there
they could stroll and talk and kiss in freedom.

When at last it became necessary for them to retrace their steps,
they found a peasant standing at the open doorway of the house by the
wood-side. Claude recognised the man and called to him:

'Hallo, Porrette! Does that shanty belong to you?'

At this the old fellow, with tears in his eyes, related that it did,
and that his tenants had gone away without paying him, leaving their
furniture behind. And he invited them inside.

'There's no harm in looking; you may know somebody who would like to
take the place. There are many Parisians who'd be glad of it. Three
hundred francs a year, with the furniture; it's for nothing, eh?'

They inquisitively followed him inside. It was a rambling old place that
seemed to have been cut out of a barn. Downstairs they found an immense
kitchen and a dining-room, in which one might have given a dance;
upstairs were two rooms also, so vast that one seemed lost in them.
As for the furniture, it consisted of a walnut bedstead in one of the
rooms, and of a table and some household utensil