“May the table be placed yonder?”

“Certainly; I often have it there, even when I am alone.”

“Ha, that is good,” he exclaimed.  “It is not human for a Frenchman to eat in the house in good weather.”

“It is a pity,” I said, “that I should have been such a bugbear.”

This remark was thoroughly disingenuous, for, although I did not doubt that anything he told me was perfectly true, nor that he had made as complete a revelation as he thought consistent with his duty toward the young man in his charge, I did not believe that his former precautions were altogether due to my presence at the inn.

And I was certain that while he might fear for his friend some chance repute of insanity, he had greater terrors than that.  As to their nature I had no clew; nor was it my affair to be guessing; but whatever they were, the days of security at Les Trois Pigeons had somewhat eased Professor Keredec’s mind in regard to them.  At least, his anxiety was sufficiently assuaged to risk dining out of doors with only my screen of honeysuckle between his charge and curious eyes.  So much was evident.

“The reproach is deserved,” he returned, after a pause.  “It is to be wished that all our bugbears might offer as pleasant a revelation, if we had the courage, or the slyness”—­he laughed—­“to investigate.”

I made a reply of similar gallantry and he got to his feet, rubbing his back as he rose.

“Ha, I am old! old!  Rheumatism in warm weather:  that is ugly.  Now I must go to my boy and see what he can make of his Gibbon.  The poor fellow!  I think he finds the decay of Rome worse than rheumatism in summer!”

He replaced his pipe in its case, and promising heartily that it should not be the last he would smoke in my company and domain, was making slowly for the door when he paused at a sound from the road.

We heard the rapid hoof-beats of a mettled horse.  He crossed our vision and the open archway:  a high-stepping hackney going well, driven by a lady in a light trap which was half full of wild flowers.  It was a quick picture, like a flash of the cinematograph, but the pose of the lady as a driver was seen to be of a commanding grace, and though she was not in white but in light blue, and her plain sailor hat was certainly not trimmed with roses, I had not the least difficulty in recognising her.  At the same instant there was a hurried clatter of foot-steps upon the stairway leading from the gallery; the startled pigeons fluttered up from the garden-path, betaking themselves to flight, and “that other monsieur” came leaping across the courtyard, through the archway and into the road.

“Glouglou!  Look quickly!” he called loudly, in French, as he came; “Who is that lady?”

Glouglou would have replied, but the words were taken out of his mouth.  Amedee awoke with a frantic start and launched himself at the archway, carroming from its nearest corner and hurtling onward at a speed which for once did not diminish in proportion to his progress.