He had also, it
seemed, to ask us to be so infinitely obliging as to excuse him for one
hour after dinner--our postcard had come unexpectedly, he said, and
already he had made an appointment with his agent about the _vendange_
for the coming autumn.... We, begged him, of course, not to allow us to
interfere with his business in the slightest degree. He thanked us a
thousand times. "'But though we dine in the village, we will take our own wine with us,'
he said, 'a wine _surfin_--one of my wines--you shall see--'

"Then he showed us round his place--I forget how many hundreds of acres
of vines, and into the great building with the presses and pumps and
casks and the huge barrel they call the thunderbolt--and about seven
o'clock we walked back to Darbisson to dinner, carrying our wine with us. I think the restaurant we dined in was the only one in the place, and our
gaillard of a host--he was a straight-backed, well-set-up chap, with
rather fine eyes--did us on the whole pretty well. His wine certainly was
good stuff, and set our tongues going....

"A moment ago I said a fellow like Rangon leads a restricted sort of life
in those parts. I saw this more clearly as dinner went on. We dined by an
open window, from which we could see the stream with the planks across it
where the women washed clothes during the day and assembled in the
evening for gossip. There were a dozen or so of them there as we dined,
laughing and chatting in low tones--they all seemed pretty--it was
quickly falling dusk--all the girls are pretty then, and are quite
conscious of it--_you_ know, Marsham. Behind them, at the end of the
street, one of these great cypress wind-screens showed black against the
sky, a ragged edge something like the line the needle draws on a rainfall
chart; and you could only tell whether they were men or women under the
plantains by their voices rippling and chattering and suddenly a deeper
note.... Once I heard a muffled scuffle and a sound like a kiss.... It
was then that Rangon's little trouble came out....

"It seemed that he didn't know any girls--wasn't allowed to know any
girls. The girls of the village were pretty enough, but you see how it
was--he'd a position to keep up--appearances to maintain--couldn't be
familiar during the year with the girls who gathered his grapes for him
in the autumn.... And as soon as Carroll gave him a chance, _he_ began to
ask _us_ questions, about England, English girls, the liberty they had,
and so on. "Of course, we couldn't tell him much he hadn't heard already, but that
made no difference; he could stand any amount of that, our strapping
young _vigneron_; and he asked us questions by the dozen, that we both
tried to answer at once. And his delight and envy!... What! In England
did the young men see the young women of their own class without
restraint--the sisters of their friends _même_--even at the house? Was it
permitted that they drank tea with them in the afternoon, or went without
invitation to pass the _soirée_?... He had all the later Prévosts in his
room, he told us (I don't doubt he had the earlier ones also); Prévost
and the Disestablishment between them must be playing the mischief
with the convent system of education for young girls; and our young man
was--what d'you call it?--'Co-ed'--co-educationalist--by Jove, yes!... He
seemed to marvel that we should have left a country so blessed as England
to visit his dusty, wild-lavender-smelling, girl-less Provence.... You
don't know half your luck, Marsham....

"Well, we talked after this fashion--we'd left the dining-room of the
restaurant and had planted ourselves on a bench outside with Rangon
between us--when Rangon suddenly looked at his watch and said it was time
he was off to see this agent of his. Would we take a walk, he asked us,
and meet him again there? he said.... But as his agent lived in the
direction of his own home, we said we'd meet him at the house in an hour
or so. Off he went, envying every Englishman who stepped, I don't
doubt.... I told you how old--how young--we were.... Heigho!... "Well, off goes Rangon, and Carroll and I got up, stretched ourselves,
and took a walk. We walked a mile or so, until it began to get pretty
dark, and then turned; and it was as we came into the blackness of one of
these cypress hedges that the thing I'm telling you of happened. The
hedge took a sharp turn at that point; as we came round the angle we saw
a couple of women's figures hardly more than twenty yards ahead--don't
know how they got there so suddenly, I'm sure; and that same moment I
found my foot on something small and white and glimmering on the grass. "I picked it up. It was a handkerchief--a woman's--embroidered--

"The two figures ahead of us were walking in our direction; there was
every probability that the handkerchief belonged to one of them; so we
stepped out....

"At my 'Pardon, madame,' and lifted hat one of the figures turned her
head; then, to my surprise, she spoke in English--cultivated English. I held out the handkerchief. It belonged to the elder lady of the two,
the one who had spoken, a very gentle-voiced old lady, older by very many
years than her companion. She took the handkerchief and thanked me....

"Somebody--Sterne, isn't it?--says that Englishmen don't travel to see
Englishmen. I don't know whether he'd stand to that in the case of
Englishwomen; Carroll and I didn't.... We were walking rather slowly
along, four abreast across the road; we asked permission to introduce
ourselves, did so, and received some name in return which, strangely
enough, I've entirely forgotten--I only remember that the ladies were
aunt and niece, and lived at Darbisson. They shook their heads when I
mentioned M. Rangon's name and said we were visiting him. They didn't
know him....

"I'd never been in Darbisson before, and I haven't been since, so I don't
know the map of the village very well. But the place isn't very big,
and the house at which we stopped in twenty minutes or so is probably
there yet. It had a large double door--a double door in two senses,
for it was a big _porte-cochère_ with a smaller door inside it, and an
iron grille shutting in the whole. The gentle-voiced old lady had already
taken a key from her reticule and was thanking us again for the little
service of the handkerchief; then, with the little gesture one makes when
one has found oneself on the point of omitting a courtesy, she gave a
little musical laugh. "'But,' she said with a little movement of invitation, 'one sees so
few compatriots here--if you have the time to come in and smoke a
cigarette ... also the cigarette,' she added, with another rippling
laugh, 'for we have few callers, and live alone--'

"Hastily as I was about to accept, Carroll was before me, professing a
nostalgia for the sound of the English tongue that made his recent
protestations about Provençal a shameless hypocrisy. Persuasive young
rascal, Carroll Was--poor chap ...