the one’s local knowledge eking out the other’s technical.  No, he wasn’t for marrying yet awhile; he’d wait till he’d got a place for the wife and kiddies.  Then he would.  The thought made him expand a bit, and Peter smiled to himself as he thought of his conversation with Langton over the family group.  It struck him to test the man, and as they passed a wayside Calvary, rudely painted, he drew his attention to it.  “What do you think of that?” he asked.

The man glanced at it, and then away.  “It’s all right for them as like it,” he said.  “Religion’s best in a church, it seems to me.  I’ve seen chaps mock at them crucifixes, sir, same as they wouldn’t if they’d only been in church.”

“Yes,” said Peter; “but I suppose some men have been helped by them who never would have been if they had only been in church.  But don’t you think they’re rather gaudy?”

“Gaudy, sir?  Meanin’ ’ighly painted?  No, not as I knows on.  They’re more like what happened, I reckon, than them brass crosses we have in our churches.”

They ran into Eu for lunch, and drew up in the market-square.  Peter went round to the girls’ car, greeted Julie, and was introduced.  He led them to an old inn in the square, and they sat down to luncheon in very good humour.  The other girls were ordinary enough, and Julie rather subdued for her.  Afterwards they spent an hour in the church and a picture-postcard shop, and it was there that Julie whispered:  “Go on in your own car.  At Dieppe, go to the Hotel Trois Poissons and wait for me.  I found out yesterday that a woman I know is a doctor in Dieppe, and she lives there.  I’ll get leave easily to call.  Then I can see you.  If we travel together these girls’ll talk; they’re just the sort.”

Peter nodded understanding, and they drifted apart.  He went out to see if the cars were ready and returned to call the nurses, and in a few minutes they were off again.

The road now ran through forests nearly all the way, except where villages had cleared a space around them, as was plain to see.  They crossed little streams, and finally came downhill through the forest into the river valley that leads to Dieppe.  It was still early, and Peter stopped the cars to suggest that they might have a look at the castle of Arques-le-Bataille.  The grand old pile kept them nearly an hour, and they wandered about the ruins to their hearts’ content.  Julie would climb a buttress of the ancient keep when their guide had gone on with the others, and Peter went up after her.  She was as lissom as a boy and seemingly as strong, swinging up by roots of ivy and the branches of a near tree, in no wise impeded by her short skirts.  From the top one had, indeed, a glorious view.  The weather had cleared somewhat, and one could see every bit of the old castle below, the village at its feet, and the forest across the little stream out of which the Duke of Mayenne’s infantry had debouched that day of battle from which the village took its name.