When we went out into the hall again she had picked the baby up, and was standing with him in her arms, there by his father's door. She patted his yellow head down against her shoulder, but he still went on crying for "Georgeot."
It was raining hard out in the grey street.
In a shop under a vaulting, that the crook of a shepherd Saint had blessed through hundreds of years, I bought a queer sort of woolly beast for the baby.
But the baby did not care for it at all.
II
Going on yet higher up into the mountains, we met a dreary little funeral, coming down under umbrellas. The coffin, under a black cloth, was pushed along in a two-wheeled cart by a woman and a very old man. Some women and two or three old people followed, and some children and dogs.
It was not the funeral of a soldier, only of some one uselessly dead.
III
Rain, sunshine, wet black rock, great blue and black and purple clouds, clear azure spaces, snows, lifted drifted crests of snow, like waves arrested—all this as we went up, and up, with a rainbow like a bridge across the valley we were leaving behind us.