“Certainly, sir,” said the man, endorsed the order to that effect, and shouldered a suit-case.  Peter followed him.  He was given a first to himself, and the Deputy R.T.O. saw the French inspector and showed him the paper.  Peter strolled off and collected a bottle of wine, some sandwiches, and some newspapers; then he made himself comfortable.  The train left punctually.  Peter lay back in his corner and watched the country slip by contentedly.  He had grown up, had this young man.

He arrived in Paris with the dawn of Sunday morning, and looked out cautiously.  There was no English official visible.  However, his papers were entirely correct, and he climbed up the stairs and wandered along a corridor in which hands and letters from time to time indicated the lair of the R.T.O.  Arriving, he found another officer waiting, but no R.T.O.  The other was “bored stiff,” he said; he had sat there an hour, but had seen no sign of the Transport Officer.  Peter smiled, and replied that he had no intention whatever of waiting; he only wanted to know the times of the Boulogne trains.  These he discovered by the aid of a railway guide on the table, and selected the midnight train, which would land him in Boulogne in time for the first leave-boat, if the train were punctual and the leave-boat not too early.  In any case, he could take the second, which would only mean Victoria a few hours later that same day.  And these details settled, he left his luggage in a corner and strolled off into the city.

A big city, seen for the first time by oneself alone when one does not know a soul in it, may be intensely boring or intensely interesting.  It depends on oneself.  Peter was in the mood to be interested.  He was introspective.  It pleased him to watch the early morning stir; to see the women come out in shawls and slipshod slippers and swill down their bit of pavement; to see sleepy shopkeepers take down their shutters and street-vendors set up their stalls; to try to gauge the thoughts and doings of the place from the shop-windows and the advertisements.  His first need was a wash and a shave, and he got both at a little barber’s in which monsieur attended to him, while madame, in considerable negligee, made her toilette before the next glass.  His second was breakfast, and he got it, a l’anglaise, with an omelette and jam, in a just-stirring hotel; and then, set up, he strolled off for the centre of things.  Many Masses were in progress at the Madeleine, and he heard one or two with a curious contentment, but they had no lesson for him, probably because of the foreign element in the atmosphere, and he did not pray.  Still, he sat, chiefly, and watched, until he felt how entirely he was a stranger here, and went out into the sun.