naturally it would be
impossible, even with the vastly improved roads of to-day, for my
automobile to penetrate everywhere I wandered afoot. Nor would I wish
it to; a few disappointments, a few failures to recapture something of
that first fine careless rapture, would instill a lyric melancholy; but
too many would make one morbid.... Well, then: at Nant, in those old
days, I once had a famous dinner; and naturally, returning, I must try
to duplicate it, even though it meant going on to Millau in the rain.
But alas! the Cafe de l'Univers is no more what it was--or I am grown
over critical."

What now of Duchemin's doubts? To tell the sad truth, they were just as
strong as ever. The man was somehow prejudiced: he found Monk's story
entirely too glib, and knew a mean sense of gratification when the cure
interposed a gentle correction.

"But in Ninety-four, monsieur, there was no Cafe de l'Univers in Nant."

Astonished eyebrows climbed the forehead of Mr. Monk.

"No, monsieur le cure? Truly not? Then it must have been another. How
one's memory will play one false!"

"How strange, then, is coincidence," Madame de Sevenie suggested. "You
who made a walking tour of this country so long ago, monsieur, regard
there that good Monsieur Duchemin, himself engaged upon just such an
undertaking."

Duchemin acknowledged with a humorous little nod Mr. Monk's look of
moderate amazement at this so strange coincidence.

"A whim of my age, monsieur," he said--"a project I have entertained
since youth but always, till of late, lacked leisure to put into
execution."

"But is there anything more wonderful than the workings of the good
God?" madame pursued. "Observe that, if Monsieur Duchemin had been
suffered to indulge his inclination in youth, we should all, I, my
daughter, my grand-daughter, even poor Georges d'Aubrac, would quite
probably be lying dead at the bottom of a cirque at Montpellier-le-Vieux."

Naturally the strangers required to know about that, and Madame de
Sevenie would talk, in fact doted on telling the tale of that great
adventure. Duchemin made a face of resignation, and heard himself
extolled as a paladin for strength, address and valour; the truth being
that he was not at all resigned and would infinitely liefer have been
left out of the limelight. The more he was represented as a person of
consequence, the less fair his chance to study these others at his
leisure, in the comfortable obscurity of their indiff