"After all, you saw her?"
"Just one day—or rather, just one night."
"Quite sufficient!" merrily said Lamuse, and Eudore the pale and serious shook his head under the shower of pointed and perilous jests that followed.
"Shut your great mouths for five minutes, chaps."
"Get on with it, petit."
"There isn't a great lot of it," said Eudore.
"Well, then, you were saying you had got a hump with your old people?"
"Ah, yes. They had tried their best to make up for Mariette—with lovely rashers of our own ham, and plum brandy, and patching up my linen, and all sorts of little spoiled-kid tricks—and I noticed they were still slanging each other in the old familiar way! But you talk about a difference! I always had my eye on the door to see if some time or other it wouldn't get a move on and turn into a woman. So I went and saw the mayor, and set off, yesterday, towards two in the afternoon—towards fourteen o'clock I might well say, seeing that I had been counting the hours since the day before! I had just one day of my leave left then.
"As we drew near in the dusk, through the carriage window of the little railway that still keeps going down there on some fag-ends of line, I recognized half the country, and the other half I didn't. Here and there I got the sense of it, all at once, and it came back all fresh to me, and melted away again, just as if it was talking to me. Then it shut up. In the end we got out, and I found—the limit, that was—that we had to pad the hoof to the last station.
"Never, old man, have I been in such weather. It had rained for six days. For six days the sky washed the earth and then washed it again. The earth was softening and shifting, and filling up the holes and making new ones."