Andre, in his awful best cassock, was waiting on the terrace.  It was on the terrace that Paul had ordered luncheon to be served.  The terrace at Saint-Graal is a very jolly place.  It stretches the whole length of the southern facade of the house, and is generously broad.  It is paved with great lozenge-shaped slabs of marble, stained in delicate pinks and greys with lichens; and a marble balustrade borders it, overgrown, the columns half uprooted and twisted from the perpendicular, by an aged wistaria-vine, with a trunk as stout as a tree’s.  Seated there, one can look off over miles of richly-timbered country, dotted with white-walled villages, and traversed by the Nive and the Adour, to the wry masses of the Pyrenees, purple curtains hiding Spain.

Here, under an awning, the table was set, gay with white linen and glistening glass and silver, a centrepiece of flowers and jugs of red and yellow wine.  The wistaria was in blossom, a world of colour and fragrance, shaken at odd moments by the swift dartings of innumerable lizards.  The sun shone hot and clear; the still air, as you touched it, felt like velvet.

‘Oh, what a heavenly place, what a heavenly day,’ cried Paul; ’it only needs a woman.’  And then, meeting Andre’s eye, he caught himself up, with a gesture of contrition.  ’I beg a thousand pardons.  I forgot your cloth.  If you,’ he added, ’would only forget it too, what larks we might have together. Allons, a table.’

And they sat down.

If Paul had sincerely wished to forfeit Andre’s respect, he could scarcely have employed more efficacious means to do so, than his speech and conduct throughout the meal that followed.  You know how flippant, how ‘fly-away,’ he can be when the mood seizes him, how wholeheartedly he can play the fool.  To-day he really behaved outrageously; and, since the priest maintained a straight countenance, I think the wonder is that he didn’t excommunicate him.

‘I remember you were a teetotaller, Andre, when you were young,’ his host began, pushing a decanter towards him.

’That, monsieur, was because my mother wished it, and my father was a drunkard,’ Andre answered bluntly.  ’Since my father’s death, I have taken wine in moderation.’  He filled his glass.

’I remember once I cooked some chestnuts over a spirit-stove, and you refused to touch them, on the ground that they were alcoholic.’

‘That would have been from a confusion of thought,’ the cure explained, with never a smile.

But it was better to err on the side of scrupulosity than on that of self-indulgence.’

’Ah, that depends.  That depends on whether the pleasure you got from your renunciation equalled that you might have got from the chestnuts.’

‘You’re preaching pure Paganism.’

’Oh, I’m not denying I’m a Pagan—­in my amateurish way.  Let me give you some asparagus.  Do you think a man can be saved who smokes cigarettes between the courses?’