M. Charnot and Jeanne faced the horses.  I sat opposite to M. Charnot, who was in the best of spirits after all the medals he had seen.  Comfortably settled in the cushions, careless of the accidents of the road, with graphic and untiring forefinger, he undertook to describe his travels in Greece, whither he had been sent on some learned enterprise by the Minister of Education, and had carried an imagination already prepossessed and dazzled with Homeric visions.  He told his story well and with detail, combining the recollections of the scholar with the impressions of an artist.  The pediment of the Parthenon, the oleanders of the Ilissus, the stream “that runs in rain-time,” the naked peak of Parnassus, the green slopes of Helicon, the blue gulf of Argus, the pine forest beside Alpheus, where the ancients worshipped “Death the Gentle”—­all of them passed in recount upon his learned lips.

I must acknowledge, to my shame, that I did not listen to all he said, but, in a favorite way I have, reserved some of my own freedom of thought, while I gave him complete freedom of speech.  And I am bound to say he did not abuse it, but consented to pause at the frontiers of Thessaly.  Then followed silence.  I gave him room to stretch.  Soon, lulled by the motion of the carriage, the stream of reminiscence ran more slowly—­then ran dry.  M. Charnot slept.

We bowled at a good pace, without jolting, over the white road.  A warm mist rose around us laden with the smell of vegetation, ripe corn, and clover from the overheated earth and the neighboring fields, which had drunk their full of sunlight.  Now and again a breath of fresh air was blown to us from the mountains.  As the darkness deepened the country grew to look like a vast chessboard, with dark and light squares of grass and corn land, melting at no great distance into a colorless and unbroken horizon.  But as night blotted out the earth, the heaven lighted up its stars.  Never have I seen them so lustrous nor in such number.  Jeanne reclined with her eyes upturned toward those limitless fields of prayer and vision; and their radiance, benignly gentle, rested on her face.  Was she tired or downcast, or merely dreaming?  I knew not.  But there was something so singularly poetic in her look and attitude that she seemed to me to epitomize in herself all the beauty of the night.

I was afraid to speak.  Her father’s sleep, and our consequent isolation, made me ill at ease.  She, too, seemed so careless of my presence, so far away in dreamland, that I had to await opportunity, or rather her leave, to recall her from it.

Finally she broke the silence herself.  A little beyond Monza she drew closer her shawl, that the night wind had ruffled, and bent over toward me: 

“You must excuse my father; he is rather tired this evening, for he has been on his feet since five o’clock.”

“The day has been so hot, too, Mademoiselle, and the medals ’came not in single spies, but in battalions’; he has a right to sleep after the battle.”