Perfect bliss, Claude reflected, as the chill of the sheets grew warm around his body, and he sniffed in the pillow the old smell of lavender.  To be so warm, so dry, so clean, so beloved!  The journey down, reviewed from here, seemed beautiful.  As soon as they had got out of the region of martyred trees, they found the land of France turning gold.  All along the river valleys the poplars and cottonwoods had changed from green to yellow,—­evenly coloured, looking like candle flames in the mist and rain.  Across the fields, along the horizon they ran, like torches passed from hand to hand, and all the willows by the little streams had become silver.  The vineyards were green still, thickly spotted with curly, blood-red branches.  It all flashed back beside his pillow in the dark:  this beautiful land, this beautiful people, this beautiful omelette; gold poplars, blue-green vineyards, wet, scarlet vine leaves, rain dripping into the court, fragrant darkness... sleep, stronger than all.

XIII

The woodland path was deep in leaves.  Claude and David were lying on the dry, springy heather among the flint boulders.  Gerhardt, with his Stetson over his eyes, was presumably asleep.  They were having fine weather for their holiday.  The forest rose about this open glade like an amphitheatre, in golden terraces of horse chestnut and beech.  The big nuts dropped velvety and brown, as if they had been soaked in oil, and disappeared in the dry leaves below.  Little black yew trees, that had not been visible in the green of summer, stood out among the curly yellow brakes.  Through the grey netting of the beech twigs, stiff holly bushes glittered.

It was the Wheeler way to dread false happiness, to feel cowardly about being fooled.  Since he had come back, Claude had more than once wondered whether he took too much for granted and felt more at home here than he had any right to feel.  The Americans were prone, he had observed, to make themselves very much at home, to mistake good manners for good-will.  He had no right to doubt the affection of the Jouberts, however; that was genuine and personal,—­not a smooth surface under which almost any shade of scorn might lie and laugh... was not, in short, the treacherous “French politeness” by which one must not let oneself be taken in.  Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.  And, anyway, he wasn’t a tourist.  He was here on legitimate business.

Claude’s sprained ankle was still badly swollen.  Madame Joubert was sure he ought not to move about on it at all, begged him to sit in the garden all day and nurse it.  But the surgeon at the front had told him that if he once stopped walking, he would have to go to the hospital.  So, with the help of his host’s best holly-wood cane, he limped out into the forest every day.  This afternoon he was tempted to go still farther.  Madame Joubert