o grow out of their hands.

They had run another half mile or so when it became apparent that
they were entering a sort of scattered village. One or two whitewashed
cottages and even a shop had appeared along the side of the road. Then,
for the first time, Turnbull twisted round his red bear to get a glimpse
of his companion, who was a foot or two behind, and remarked abruptly:
"Mr. MacIan, we've been going the wrong way to work all along. We're
traced everywhere, because everybody knows about us. It's as if one went
about with Kruger's beard on Mafeking Night."

"What do you mean?" said MacIan, innocently.

"I mean," said Turnbull, with steady conviction, "that what we want is a
little diplomacy, and I am going to buy some in a shop."

XI. A SCANDAL IN THE VILLAGE

In the little hamlet of Haroc, in the Isle of St. Loup, there lived a
man who--though living under the English flag--was absolutely untypical
of the French tradition. He was quite unnoticeable, but that was exactly
where he was quite himself. He was not even extraordinarily French; but
then it is against the French tradition to be extraordinarily French.
Ordinary Englishmen would only have thought him a little old-fashioned;
imperialistic Englishmen would really have mistaken him for the old John
Bull of the caricatures. He was stout; he was quite undistinguished; and
he had side-whiskers, worn just a little longer than John Bull's. He
was by name Pierre Durand; he was by trade a wine merchant; he was by
politics a conservative republican; he had been brought up a Catholic,
had always thought and acted as an agnostic, and was very mildly
returning to the Church in his later years. He had a genius (if one can
even use so wild a word in connexion with so tame a person) a genius for
saying the conventional thing on every conceivable subject; or rather
what we in England would call the conventional thing. For it was not
convention with him, but solid and manly conviction. Convention implies
cant or affectation, and he had not the faintest smell of either. He was
simply an ordinary citizen with ordinary views; and if you had told him
so he would have taken it as an ordinary compliment. If you had asked
him about women, he would have said that one must preserve their
domesticity and decorum; he would have used the stalest words, but he
would have in reserve the strongest arguments. If you had asked him
about government, he would have said that all citize