top of a tower, how curiously like the one at St. Armand! Upon the mountains on the other side the harbour there was still some snow—stainless as the snows of old, above Barue: and the harbour itself, so shut in by these spring-green paddocks, so satin-smooth to-day, did not look any more like the salt and separating sea, it looked precisely like the little lake of Mec; the jetty, too, though he had never noticed it before, was the wooden twin of that one to which old Mathieu’s boat had been wont to bring an occasional tourist in search of his father’s beautiful wood-carvings, his boiserie. . .
. . . What were these globe-like yellow flowers in old Mrs. Pochette’s garden? She had never had them before; or at least he had never remarked them before. Surely, surely—they were that very same yellow ranunculus of which he had been used to pluck bouquets for Ninon in that lush riverside pasture by old Fleury’s mill! Boules de beurre, she called them, or sometimes boules d’or—butter-balls, or balls of gold. He remembered! Only those flowers of Home were finer—everything at Home was finer. Why should he think so much of Home this morning? Hark! wasn’t that surely the cuckoo now? Alas, no; only a sea-bird, and how tired he felt all of a sudden! Miséricorde, how tired! Yonder to the right, only a very little way up the hill, was that sunny paddock of Métrailleur’s that had the dry rocks in it. He would go and sit a little on those rocks and rest. Why not? . . . There, at last! How very fatigued he was! Ah, how weary!
Métrailleur’s paddock was a long, grassy slope, with a fine view out over the lake above the clustered
