But in this we were fortunate. The key which I had carried so long in the inner pocket of my jacket turned easily. The door swung noiselessly inwards, and the clean breath of the salt breeze from the Camargue marshes made our faces pleasantly chill and our lips sticky. We locked the door on the outside, and in another minute stood in the roadway, looking back at the great ghostly pile of the Palace of the Monks—as Louis the XIV had called it, when he cut down the plans so that it should not rival in dimensions that "abyss of expenditure" which was Versailles.
But it was no time to stand sentimentalising upon architecture. We turned and went down the vacant white road as fast as our legs would serve us.
CHAPTER IV
THROUGH THE ENEMY'S LINES
"Halt there!" cried Deventer suddenly to me. We were passing a pleasant white and green villa with a light in one ground-floor window.
I stopped, and Deventer took me by the arm, with forceful compulsion.
"I am going to help my father," he whispered. "Don't you run off without telling yours what you mean to do. He can't prevent you, if you have made your mind up."
"He won't try—he will only be glad to get back to his books."
"Perhaps, but at any rate tell him yourself. He will like it better than when the hue and cry gets up to-morrow over yonder. You take my word for it, Angus Cawdor."