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Rechamp explained me, and she was full of thanks and welcome; not excessive, but–well, I don’t know–eloquent! She gave every intonation all it could carry, and without the least emphasis: that’s the wonder.

She went back to “prepare” the parents, as they say in melodrama; and in a minute or two we followed. What struck me first was that these insignificant and inadequate people had the command of the grand gesture–had la ligne. The mother had laid aside her knitting–not dropped it–and stood waiting with open arms. But even in clasping her son she seemed to include me in her welcome. I don’t know how to describe it; but they never let me feel I was in the way. I suppose that’s part of what you call distinction; knowing instinctively how to deal with unusual moments.

All the while, I was looking about me at the fine secure old room, in which nothing seemed altered or disturbed, the portraits smiling from the walls, the servants beaming in the doorway–and wondering how such things could have survived in the trail of death and havoc we had been following.

The same thought had evidently struck Jean, for he dropped his sister’s hand and turned to gaze about him too.

“Then nothing’s touched–nothing? I don’t understand,” he stammered.

Monsieur de Rechamp raised himself majestically from his chair, crossed the room and lifted Yvonne Malo’s hand to his lips. “Nothing is touched–thanks to this hand and this brain.”

Madame de Rechamp was shining on her son through tears. “Ah, yes–we owe it all to Yvonne.”

“All, all! Grandmamma will tell you!” Simone chimed in; and Yvonne, brushing aside their praise with a half-impatient laugh, said to her betrothed: “But your grandmother! You must go up to her at once.”

A wonderful specimen, that grandmother: I was taken to see her after dinner. She sat by the fire in a bare panelled bedroom, bolt upright in an armchair with ears, a knitting-table at her elbow with a shaded candle on it.

She was even more withered and ancient than she looked in her photograph, and I judge she’d never been pretty; but she somehow made me feel as if I’d got through with prettiness. I don’t know exactly what she reminded me of: a dried bouquet, or something rich and clovy that had turned brittle through long keeping in a sandal-wood box. I suppose her sandal-wood box had been Good Society. Well, I had a rare evening with her. Jean and his parents were called down to see the cure, who had hurried over to the chateau when he heard of the young man’s arrival; and the old lady asked me to stay on and chat with her. She related their experiences with uncanny detachment, seeming chiefly to resent the indignity of having been made to descend into the cellar–“to avoid French shells, if you’ll believe it: the Germans had the decency not to bombard us,” she observed impartially. I was so struck by the absence of rancour in her tone that finally, out of sheer curiosity, I made an allusion to the horror of having the enemy under one’s roof. “Oh, I might almost say I didn’t see them,” she returned. “I never go downstairs any longer; and they didn’t do me the honour of coming beyond my door. A glance sufficed them–an old woman like me!” she added with a phosphorescent gleam of coquetry.

“But they searched the chateau, surely?” “Oh, a mere form; they were very decent–very decent,” she almost snapped at me. “There was a first moment, of course, when we feared it might be hard to get Monsieur de Rechamp away with my young grandson; but Mlle. Malo managed that very cleverly. They slipped off while the officers were dining.” She looked at me with the smile of some arch old lady in a Louis XV pastel. “My grandson Jean’s fiancee is a very clever young woman: in my time no young girl would have been so sure of herself, so cool and quick. After all, there is something to be said for the new way of bringing up girls. My poor daughter-in-law, at Yvonne’s age, was a bleating baby: she is so still, at times. The convent doesn’t develop character. I’m glad Yvonne was not brought up in a convent.” And this champion of tradition smiled on me more intensely.