If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon
Every night and all,
Sit thee down and put them on,
And Christ receive thy soul.

Turnbull had no such lyrical meditations, but he was in an even worse temper.

At length they came to a pale ribbon of road, edged by a shelf of rough and almost colourless turf; and a few feet up the slope there stood grey and weather-stained, one of those big wayside crucifixes which are seldom seen except in Catholic countries.

MacIan put his hand to his head and found that his bonnet was not there.  Turnbull gave one glance at the crucifix—­a glance at once sympathetic and bitter, in which was concentrated the whole of Swinburne’s poem on the same occasion.

O hidden face of man, whereover
The years have woven a viewless veil,
If thou wert verily man’s lover
What did thy love or blood avail? 
Thy blood the priests mix poison of,
And in gold shekels coin thy love.

Then, leaving MacIan in his attitude of prayer, Turnbull began to look right and left very sharply, like one looking for something.  Suddenly, with a little cry, he saw it and ran forward.  A few yards from them along the road a lean and starved sort of hedge came pitifully to an end.  Caught upon its prickly angle, however, there was a very small and very dirty scrap of paper that might have hung there for months, since it escaped from someone tearing up a letter or making a spill out of a newspaper.  Turnbull snatched at it and found it was the corner of a printed page, very coarsely printed, like a cheap novelette, and just large enough to contain the words:  “et c’est elle qui——­”

“Hurrah!” cried Turnbull, waving his fragment; “we are safe at last.  We are free at last.  We are somewhere better than England or Eden or Paradise.  MacIan, we are in the Land of the Duel!”

“Where do you say?” said the other, looking at him heavily and with knitted brows, like one almost dazed with the grey doubts of desolate twilight and drifting sea.

“We are in France!” cried Turnbull, with a voice like a trumpet, “in the land where things really happen—­Tout arrive en France.  We arrive in France.  Look at this little message,” and he held out the scrap of paper.  “There’s an omen for you superstitious hill folk. C’est elle qui—­Mais oui, mais oui, c’est elle qui sauvera encore le monde.”

“France!” repeated MacIan, and his eyes awoke again in his head like large lamps lighted.

“Yes, France!” said Turnbull, and all the rhetorical part of him came to the top, his face growing as red as his hair.  “France, that has always been in rebellion for liberty and reason.  France, that has always assailed superstition with the club of Rabelais or the rapier of Voltaire.  France, at whose first council table sits the sublime figure of Julian the Apostate.  France, where a man said only the other day those splendid unanswerable words”—­with a superb gesture—­“’we have extinguished in heaven those lights that men shall never light again.’”