“What was his name?” It was Dian who spoke.
Jean shook his head, and so did Marie Josephine.
“I ought to remember but I don’t. A farm boy came up to the cart and gave him a letter to deliver on his way back, just as we were getting out of the cart. The boy spoke his name but I’ve forgotten it,” answered Jean.
A cross-eyed coach driver on the Calais road, a farm boy with a note for him to deliver on his way back. Dian bowed his head over his hands and sat quietly. As Jean went on Dian knew what he had so longed to know, that the note for Grigge had fallen safely into the hands of Champar the coach driver, who was his friend.
“He asked him if he went near Pigeon Valley, and the driver said, 'Yes, sometimes in good weather,’ and that he was going that way on his route back,” Jean said, thus giving Dian the knowledge he so longed to possess.
“Do go on and tell how we walked all night because we had slept all day,” put in Marie Josephine impatiently.
“You tell, Little Mademoiselle,” said Jean.
“It was the best time of all, I think, for though we were thrilled the first night we were—well, not frightened, but sort of not used to it all. We’d had a splendid rest all day and we were so excited. It was such a warm night, and the wild lavender was so sweet that the whole wood smelt of it. It was splendid out on the highroad, too, and we never met anything to frighten us. We had the food we’d both brought, and we ate it at dawn under a big flowering hawthorn tree. We kept on walking, and we didn’t know how tired we were, until all of a sudden we couldn’t go another step. We went to sleep in a sort of summer house in the garden of an empty house. No one saw us, and in the afternoon we started on.” Marie Josephine hesitated, and then said honestly:
“We were all tired out by that time and I was very cross.”
“It was my fault because I was homesick,” put in Jean.