moods, her autumn dreams, her wintry tempers, and I had vaunted my faithfulness and love.  But here was France in prime of summer, giving me of her best.  My heart warmed to her loveliness, and I sniffed the perfume of her breath, mysteriously characteristic as the chosen perfume of some loved woman’s laces.  It was glorious to spin on, on, between the rows of sentinel poplars, bound for the horizon, yet never reaching it, and regarding crowded haunts of men more as interruptions than as halting places.

Harfleur was a mere mirage to me, a vision of a gently decaying town left stranded by the stream of civilisation, flowing past to busy Havre.  Some lines from “Henry the Fifth” made elusive music in my brain, mixed with a discussion of carburetters, explosion chambers, and sparking-plugs.  At Lillebonne, Winston deigned to break short his string of motor technicalities and point out the position of the Roman theatre, almost the sole treasure of the sort possessed by Northern Europe.  I stared through my goggles at the castle where the Conqueror unfolded to the assembled barons his scheme for invading England; and I begged for a slackening of speed at ancient Caudebec, which, with its quay and terrace overhanging the Seine, and its primly pruned elms, had such an air of happy peace that I wished to stamp it firmly in my memory.  Such mental photographs are convenient when one courts sleep at night, and has grown weary of counting uncountable sheep jumping over a stile.

Beyond Caudebec we sailed along a road running high on the shoulder of the hill, with wide views over the serpentine writhings of the Seine.  Here, Jack urged a turning aside for St. Wandeville or, at least, for the abbey of Jumieges, poetic with memories of Agnes Sorel, whose heart lies in the keeping of the monks, though her body sleeps at Loches.  But Molly would countenance no loitering. Her body, she said, should sleep at Paris that night.

We held straight on, therefore, keeping to a road at the foot of white cliffs, sometimes near the river, sometimes leaving it.  Quickly enough to please even this unaccountably impatient Molly, we had measured off the fifty miles separating Havre from Rouen, and slowed down for the venerable streets of the Norman capital.

“I suppose even you will want to give half an hour to the cathedral which I love best in France?” Jack inquired, looking back at Molly as he turned from the quay up the Rue Grand Port, and stopped in the mellow shade of an incomparable pile which towered above us.

Molly’s mushroom, however, was agitated in dissent.  She has an American chin, and an American chin spells determination.  We could not see it, but we knew that it meant business.  “You and I will spend hours in the cathedral another time,” she said.  “But now—­” She did not finish her sentence, nevertheless a look of comprehension again lighted up Jack’s face, which for the moment was innocent of goggles.