she observed, "is a dangerous thing." Obviously it was not through crystals that our sorceress gazed into the future. We went inside and gossiped with Veuve Felix. Angela did most of the talking. I was too occupied in watching the unfrugal folds that fell from the widow's chin in a pente pas assez rapide, and extended to a point a little below the middle of her apron. She ought always to sit at the door of her shop, I thought, a monument of thrift and the bourgeois virtues. For Veuve Felix kept a small cooperative store, and was agent for a Prudential Insurance Society. Angela bought half the pyramid of Kub. "It just shows," she said when we got outside. It showed a great many things that frugality was rewarded in the person of Veuve Felix; that Lys was a bit ahead of the times twenty-two years ago; that, as Angela had already remarked, a little French is a dangerous thing; and that further, commerce with the occult was inadvisable. But to which of these showings Angela referred I had no clue. "Still," I said, we have had a jolly day." "Positively blissful," said Angela. Blissful had become a family word through contact with Ursa Major. It could be applied with varying shades of significance, ironically to things ursine, as well as literally in its primary sense to things angelic. Thus the adjectival form of Angela and her antithesis in the order of Homo sapiens could be synonyms. This may appear a pedantic excursion into domestic philology; it is none the less relevant. We had been thinking so much of the witch that we had forgotten the important decision we had come to consult her about. Angela's "positively blissful" reminded me that we were no forwarder. Should we, or should we not, pack up our things and take the next train Blisswards. The oracular inspiration was wanting. Angela said as much as we got into our fiacre. It was just at that moment that my eye caught the board with its inscription, "Felix." "The oracle has spoken," I said. "What oracle?" said Angela. I pointed to the board. "If that doesn't direct us to Bliss, "Why Kub?" I asked her. his abode, then all oracles are "It's vile stuff." "It's not very nice," she agreed, "but it's cheap. And it will save us going to the boucherie." dumb." So that was the end of our Wednesday." supernatural solicitings. What a delightful thing is decision. The prophetess had cast out doubt. "Before the end of the week we shall see the kiddies." 66 And Homersfield." "Home, Homer, Homersfield," repeated Angela. I dismissed the doubtfully blissful considerations that had weighed with me so much, screwing money out of him for repairs, putting things straight with his tenants, keeping my temper, supporting his ursine humours; all these misgivings perished, asphyxiated in nostalgia, like moths in Val's collecting bottle. "I shall go to Homersfield every day," cooed Angela, with the voice of a rock dove. "The Whittakers leave on the fifteenth. There will be heaps to do in the garden." I could see her rapturously potting chrysanthemums. "Why not instal the Brebis for a bit ? " We talked Homersfield most of the way home, and after Angela thought this a very dinner amidst desultory pack good idea. The Brebis, I should have mentioned, had forsaken France. Never again would she have to cross the channel, or smell incense, or see crucifixes or calvaires, or reposoirs at the corner of the street, or processions of the Fête Dieu, or other such abominations and idolatries. Dax and Ax and Aix would know her no more. She had found a place in England with a name that ended in "wich," a much homelier termination, and the baths were every bit as good. ing. The children were to spend a night with the Whittakers. They would have visited Farmer Stubbs, and the rickyard, and the Baron and Baroness Fig-tree, and the cow called Hungry, and inspected their museum, and no doubt laid night lines for eels. We could smell the water-mill, and the Witch Pool, and Hungry's stable; and to these ghost smells we added another, equally homely and more persuasive, that of a log fire which we lighted in my bedroom. It was our first and last extravagance of the kind. Downstairs we had a comfortless anthracite stove, one of those French salamandres with a serpentine coil of pipe running into the wall, which emit heat without cheerfulness, and are as ugly as sin, or the kongamato, which they probably resemble. Angela in a room with a salamandre was an incongruous picture, one of the exactions of the Disciplinary Spirit. As we drew up our deckchairs to the blaze we heard the stroke of an axe on the terrace below. We looked out of the window and saw the stalwart Louise working by the light of a lantern which she had hooked to Madame Brun's Judas tree. She was chopping up the skeleton of Madame Brun's garden seat. Presently she stumped upstairs with the débris in her apron, and emptied it with a great clatter on the floor. "C'est bon. C'est bon. N'est ce pas. Le bon feu." The lapping and flickering induced sleep, in which I visited a confusion of streams, and watched Val catching crayfish in the fountain of the Taverne Bernéde, and emptying a bucket of them into the Homer, enormous fellows, ugly and deformed, climbing on each other's backs four deep in the slimy corners. I was afraid they would get into the bowls of cream which had been set in the fountain to cool. When I woke up I was asking the empty chair which had contained Angela whether it was Lange or L'Ange. When I come to think of it, I do not know to this day, and I am not likely to be any wiser until I visit that blessed He would say that the spot again. In the meanwhile open fireplace was our goût, I I like to think of it as suppose, and the salamandre L'Ange. Ah, Louise! Comme vous nous avez toujours choyé ! Yes, a fire has a soul, and firelight is poetry. "Why does the Frenchman prefer his stuffy asphyxiating pipe?" I asked Angela. 66 XVI. ŒUFS À LA COQUE. It was a melancholy arrival most alarming news of Uncle at the Clapperhouse. Sellinger met us at the station with the Bliss. A complete breakdown. peripheral neuritis, a touch of paralysis on the left side of his face and arm, accompanied by an almost complete loss of memory. He would have been all right, Sellinger told us, if only he had kept quiet, but on Monday that was the day we consulted the oracle of Lyshe took it into his head to get up. Uncle Bliss evaded Staff, dressed himself, and went for a walk in the park. Staff found him in the stables, lying on the straw, unconscious. Sellinger drove us to the Clapperhouse. As we drew up at the door we heard Staff's flute. "That's Sancho Panza," he said. "Cronk tells me he is worth half a dozen nurses." I saw a nurse's head at the window. So Uncle Bliss was too prostrate to resist the invasion. I remembered that he couldn't abide the idea of having one in the house. Cronk was there when we arrived, and he cheered us up a good deal. A patient who had survived what Bliss had been through might defeat any attack. He still had a fair amount of vitality to draw And no wonder, with that eye of his. He has saved his life." "It's not the first time," I said. If the knight were thrown, it would not be Sancho Panza's fault for not girthing Rosinante tight enough. Cronk decided that it would be better for us not to see him until he was in a condition to recognise people. He had lost his memory about recent things, and was subject to hallucinations, a kind of divided identity, one half thwarting the other. He was in good form the day the children came over. That was before the attack. It was a week or two before we were given a chance of seeing him. The first time he spoke to us was out-of-doors, on the drive, in the chair pushed by Sancho Panza. have applied her science to the frustration of the captive's migratory instincts. But the flamingo, it appeared, was not our objective this morning. "Take me to the bear," Uncle Bliss said. "Have you got the plantains?" "Ay, ay," said Staff. And he gave me a saturnine signal with the "useful eye." The bear's cage was in the stables. We halted in front of it. There was a drinking trough and a pole with a platform at the top and some banana skins in the corner, but no bear. Uncle Bliss beckoned to Angela and pointed. She bent down over him. "Ursa Minor," he whispered huskily. "A fastidious feeder. Likes a little marmalade on his bread. Remember that, Staff. A squish sandwich. Spread it on thick. Has Mr Dickenson been here to-day?" "Ay, ay," said Sancho Panza. Uncle Bliss was back in his Cambridge days. I remembered that Ursa Minor had been his opposite number at Clare-I suppose he adopted the name the undergraduates gave it and that Dickenson was an accomplice in saving the pair of them from expulsion. "Where has he got to? I don't see him." Uncle Bliss stared into the empty loosebox. "He'll be in the sleeping berth," Sancho Panza said; and he strode round to the back of the cage and tapped the wood with his knuckles, at which an angry "Woof, Mar We had thought of sending for her at half term. Our plan was that Kathleen Ismay, a niece of Marjorie's, should come and live with us and share a governess with Irene. jorie had found us a delightful woman, a friend of hers. Cronk was persuaded that the children would be an excellent tonic when Uncle Bliss was more himself. But, of course, we had to postpone the arrangement. After the Christmas holidays, perhaps. For a melancholy month I worked hard at my Froissart, and Angela at Uncle Bliss' garden and conservatory. Sometimes John would come over from Homersfield to help. The Brebis was established there now, and we occasionally went over to see her. Once she took her courage in both hands and hired the station fly-a vehicle so low on its four wheels that its nearness to earth was a positive dangerand drove over to spend the afternoon with us. She was |