Part of the mystery was solved.  Jaffery had been right in his deduction that he had left London on a professional engagement; but we had not thought of an engagement out of England.  I had a correct answer now to my question:  “Why Havre of all places?” Jaffery sitting with Liosha on the back seat of the victoria saw it too and we exchanged glances.  But Liosha had eyes for nothing save her hands tightly clasped in her lap.  We passed another column before we entered the Place Gambetta, where already at that early hour, above its wide terrace, the striped awning of Tortoni’s was flung.  We alighted at the hotel and ordered our three rooms; coffee and roll to be taken up to madame; we men would eat our petit dejeuner downstairs.  Liosha left us without saying a word.

Bathed, shaved, changed, refreshed by the good cafe au lait, gladdened by the sunshine and smugly satisfied with our morning’s work, quite a different Hilary Freeth sat with Jaffery on the terrace from the sleepless wreck he had awakened two hours before.  My urbane dismissal of Ras Fendihook lingered suave in my memory.  The glow of conscious heroism warmed me, even like last night’s dinner, to sympathy with my kind.  After despatching, by the chasseur, a long telegram to Barbara, and sending up to Liosha’s room a bunch of red roses we bought at a florist’s hard by, I surrendered myself idly to the contemplation of the matutinal Sunday life of provincial France, while Jaffery smoked his pipe and uttered staccato maledictions on Mr. Ras Fendihook.

I love provincial France.  It is narrow, it is bourgeois, it is regarding of its sous, it is what you will.  But it lives a spacious, out-of-door, corporate life.  On Sundays, it does not bury itself, like provincial England, in a cellular house.  It walks abroad.  It indulges in its modest pleasures.  It is serious, it is intensely conscious of family, but it can take deep breaths of freedom.  It is not Sundayfied into our vacuous boredom.  It clings to the picturesque, in which it finds its dignified delight.  The little soldier clad in blue tunic and red trousers struts along with his fiancee or maitresse on his arm; the cuirassier swaggers by in brass helmet and horsehair plume; the cavalry officer, dapper in light blue, with his pretty wife, drinks syrup at a neighbouring table in your cafe.  The work-girls, even on Sunday, go about bareheaded, as though they were at home in the friendly street.  The cure in shovel hat and cassock; the workmen for whom Sunday happens not to be the jour de repos hebdomadaire ordained by law, in their blue sarreau; the peasants from outlying villages—­the men in queer shell-jackets with a complication of buttons, the women in dazzling white caps astonishingly gauffered; the lawyer in decent black, with his white cambric tie; the fat and greasy citizen with fat and greasy wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an exiguous cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a quarter of an inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair of gendarmes with their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords; the white-aproned waiters standing by cafe tables—­all these types are distinct, picked out pleasurably by the eye; they give a cheery sense of variety; the stage is dressed.