“No, dearest,” said his wife gently, but firmly, and I could have hugged her.  My bump of reverence for the Gothic in all its developments is creditably large, but in my present “lowness of mind,” as Molly would say, a long procession of cold, majestic cathedrals would have reduced me to a limp pulp.  “No,” Molly went on, “I can’t help thinking that the churches would be a sort of anticlimax after our beloved, warm-blooded chateaux.  It would be like being taken to see your great-grandmother’s grave when you’d been promised a matinee.  You know we engaged to get Lord Lane into his lonely fastnesses as soon as possible——­”

“I don’t believe Monty’s in any hurry for them,” said Jack, crestfallen.  “You ask him if——­”

“He’d be too polite to be truthful.  No, I’m sure that edelweiss will do him more good than rose windows, and mountain air than incense.”

As she thus prescribed for my symptoms, she gazed through her talc window with marked particularity into her “Lightning Conductor’s” un-goggled face.  It wore a puzzled expression at first, which suddenly brightened into comprehension.  “Do they repent having brought me along, and want to get rid of me?” I asked myself.  I could scarcely believe this.  They were too kind and cordial; still, something in that look exchanged between them hinted at a secret which concerned me, and my curiosity was pricked.  Nevertheless, I was grateful to Molly, whatever her motive might be for hurrying on to Paris.  Fond as I was of the two, their happy love, constantly though inadvertently displayed before my eyes, was not a panacea for the wound which they were trying to cure, and I still longed for high Alpine solitudes.

I had let myself drift into a gloomy thought-land, when it occurred to Jack that I had better learn to drive.  No doubt the clear fellow fancied that I “wanted rousing” and certainly I got it.  Luckily, as a small boy, I had taken an interest in mechanics, to the extent of various experiments actively disapproved of by my family, and the old fire was easily relit.  I listened to his harangue in mere civility at first, then with a certain eagerness.  Molly sat in the tonneau, Jack driving, full-petrol ahead, and I beside him.  We talked motor talk, and he forgot the churches, except when they seemed actually to come out of their way to get in ours.  I listened, and at the same time gathered impressions of roads—­long, strange, curiously individual roads.

Someone has written of the “long, long Indian day.”  I should like to write of the long, long roads of France.  They had never before had any place in my thoughts.  Paris and the Riviera had been France for me till now.  I had never been intimate, never even got on terms of real friendship with any country save my own; and I had sometimes been narrow enough to take a kind of pride in this.  The sweet English country had yielded up her secrets to me; I knew her spring whimsies, her soft summer