I offered him my warmest congratulations.  If ever a man deserved success it was he, and it was good to see the look of pleasure on his face as I told him so.

“And now,” said I presently, “I also have a surprise for you, Joseph.”

He laughed.  “Eh bien, M’sieur, it is your turn to take my breath away.”

“My last billet in France, before being wounded,” I told him, “was in a Picardy village called Flechinelle.”

He raised his hands.  “Mon Dieu,” he cried, “it is my own village!”

“More than that,” I continued, “for nearly six weeks I lodged just behind the church, in a whitewashed cottage with a stock of oranges, pipes and boot-laces for sale in the window.”

“It is my mother’s shop!” he exclaimed breathlessly.

I nodded my head, and then proceeded to give him the hundred-and-one messages that I had received from the little old lady as soon as she discovered that I knew her son.

“It is so long since I ’ave seen ’er,” said Monsieur Joseph, blowing his nose violently.  “So ’ard I work in London these ten, fifteen years that only once have I gone ’ome since my father died.”

Then I told him how bent and old his mother was, and how lonesome she had seemed all by herself in the cottage, and as I spoke of the shop which she still kept going in her front-room the tears fairly rained down his face.

“But, M’sieur,” said he, “that which you tell me is indeed strange; for those letters which she writes to me week by week are always gay, and it ’as seemed to me that my mother was well content.”

Then he struck his fist on the table.  “I ’ave it,” he said.  “She shall come to live ’ere with me in Londres.  All that she desires shall be ’ers, for am I not a rich man?”

I shook my head.  “She would never leave her village now,” I told him.  “And I know well that she desires nothing in the world except to see you again.”

Then as I rose to go, “Good night, M’sieur,” said Joseph a little sadly.  “Be very sure that there is always a welcome for you ’ere.”

The next time that I dined at the Mazarin was some four weeks later, on the eve of my return to the Front.  A strange waiter showed me to my place, and Joseph was nowhere to be seen.  Indeed a wholly different air seemed to pervade the place since my last visit.  Presently I beckoned to a waiter whom I recognised as having served under the old regime.  “Where is Monsieur Joseph?” I asked him.

“Where indeed, Sir!” the man replied.  “It is all so strange.  One day it is arranged that he shall take over the restaurant and its staff, and on the next he come to say ‘Good-bye’ to us all, and then leave for France.  Oh, it is drole.  So good a business man to lose the chance that comes once only in a life!  He is too old to fight.  Yet who knows?  Maybe he heard of something better out there....”

As the man spoke the gold-and-white walls of the restaurant faded, the clatter of plates and dishes died away, and I was back again in a tiny village shop in Picardy.  Across the counter, packed with its curious stock, I saw Monsieur Joseph, with shirt-sleeves rolled up, gravely handing a stick of chocolate to a child, and taking its sou in return.  In the diminutive kitchen behind sat a little white-haired old lady with such a look of content on her face as I have rarely seen.