“Is young Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?”

He said the words almost aloud, and he became aware that the fat woman with a live fowl at her feet and the butcher’s boy on his other side were looking at him curiously.  He realized that he was behaving in an excited manner, and so sat back and lowered his eyes.  But over and over within him the words said themselves—­over and over, until they made a sort of mad, foolish refrain.

“Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?  Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?” He was afraid that he would say it aloud once more, and, he tried to keep a firm hold upon himself.

The tram swung into the rue de Sevres, and rolled smoothly out the long, uninteresting stretch of the rue Lecourbe, far out to where the houses, became scattered, where mounds and pyramids of red tiles stood alongside the factory where they had been made, where an acre of little glass hemispheres in long, straight rows winked and glistened in the afternoon sun—­the forcing-beds of some market gardener; out to the Porte de Versailles at the city wall, where a group of customs officers sprawled at ease before their little sentry-box or loafed over to inspect an incoming tram.

A bugle sounded and a drum beat from the great fosse under the wall, and a company of piou-pious, red-capped, red-trousered, shambled through their evolutions in a manner to break the heart of a British or a German drill-sergeant.  Then out past level fields to little Vanves, with its steep streets and its old gray church, and past the splendid grounds of the Lycee beyond.  The fat woman got down, her live fowl shrieking protest to the movement, and the butcher’s boy got down, too, so that Ste. Marie was left alone upon the imperiale save for a snuffy old gentleman in a pot-hat who sat in a corner buried behind the day’s Droits de l’Homme.

Ste. Marie moved forward once more and laid his arms upon the iron rail before him.  They were coming near.  They ran past plum and apple orchards and past humble little detached villas, each with a bit of garden in front and an acacia or two at the gate-posts.  But presently, on the right, the way began to be bordered by a high stone wall, very long, behind which showed the trees of a park, and among them, far back from the wall beyond a little rise of ground, the gables and chimneys of a house could be made out.  The wall went on for perhaps a quarter of a mile in a straight sweep, but half-way the road swung apart from it to the left, dipped under a stone railway bridge, and so presently ended at the village of Clamart.