Nevertheless we waited alone on the recreation ground, our heads a little dizzy. The swooning hum of the class-rooms awoke behind us, but we heeded not at all.
We saw the tricolour of the Republic come down with a run from the tall flagstaff on Fort St. André, and presently, irregularly tugged, rising a few feet at a time, a red flag fluttered out, probably an improvised table-cover or bedspread. It flapped out bravely in the brisk breeze off the water.
We had had our first glimpse of "The Tatter of Scarlet."
CHAPTER II
KITH AND KIN
I don't think I troubled much about my father when I resolved to run away from the Lycée St. André. He had, as I thought, never troubled much about me.
Afterwards I found that I had been mistaken, but perhaps not more than most. For it is the rarest thing in the world to find a son entering upon life, able to do justice to his father's ideas and motives.
Yet it was for my sake that he had given up the society of his fellow savants and had exiled himself to Aramon le Vieux, with only his books for company. At Nice, Mentone, or Cap Martin, the author of "The History and Growth of Italian Art" could have lived a great part of the year among kindred spirits, but because of me and St. André, he had shut himself up with his books and collections in the Villa Gobelet on the piney southern slopes of the long convent ridge, the summit of which was crowned by the immense acreage of rambling white masonry which constituted our lycée.
My father, Gordon Cawdor, mixed freely enough with the engineers in New Aramon. But I knew very well that he endured rather than enjoyed their society.