nearly to the earth.  A roaring day it was, I remember....  But the wind fell a little late in the afternoon, and we were poring over what it had left of our Ordnance Survey—­like fools, we’d got the unmounted paper maps instead of the linen ones—­when Rangon himself found us, coming out to meet us in a very badly turned-out trap.  He drove us back himself, through Darbisson, to the house, a mile and a half beyond it, where he lived with his mother.

“He spoke no English, Rangon didn’t, though, of course, both French and Provencal; and as he drove us, there was Carroll, using him as a Franco-Provencal dictionary, peppering him with questions about the names of things in the patois—­I beg its pardon, the language—­though there’s a good deal of my eye and Betty Martin about that, and I fancy this Felibrige business will be in a good many pieces when Frederic Mistral is under that Court-of-Love pavilion arrangement he’s had put up for himself in the graveyard at Maillanne.  If the language has got to go, well, it’s got to go, I suppose; and while I personally don’t want to give it a kick, I rather sympathise with the Government.  Those jaunts of a Sunday out to Les Baux, for instance, with paper lanterns and Bengal fire and a fellow spouting O blanche Venus d’Arles—­they’re well enough, and compare favourably with our Bank Holidays and Sunday League picnics, but ... but that’s nothing to do with my tale after all....  So he drove on, and by the time we got to Rangon’s house Carroll had learned the greater part of Magali....

“As you, no doubt, know, it’s a restricted sort of life in some respects that a young vigneron lives in those parts, and it was as we reached the house that Rangon remembered something—­or he might have been trying to tell us as we came along for all I know, and not been able to get a word in edgeways for Carroll and his Provencal.  It seemed that his mother was away from home for some days—­apologies of the most profound, of course; our host was the soul of courtesy, though he did try to get at us a bit later....  We expressed our polite regrets, naturally; but I didn’t quite see at first what difference it made.  I only began to see when Rangon, with more apologies, told us that we should have to go back to Darbisson for dinner.  It appeared that when Madame Rangon went away for a few days she dispersed the whole of the female side of her establishment also, and she’d left her son with nobody to look after him except an old man we’d seen in the yard mending one of these double-cylindered sulphur-sprinklers they clap across the horse’s back and drive between the rows of vines....  Rangon explained all this as we stood in the hall drinking an aperitif—­a hall crowded with oak furniture and photographs and a cradle-like bread-crib and doors opening to right and left to the other rooms of the ground floor.  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.