risk holding his hand too long, feeling certain that if
she did so she would scare him. Yet she^ could not
force back the words that now rose to her lips in their
own soft Provencal language: Tu lou souleu de ma

he answer?*
He answered quite simply: cMigo —my friend/
But Jan, who had heard her, grew curiously silent.
Alone at a table just across the room sat a person
very elegantly apparelled. He was wearing an open-
necked white silk shirt, a green cummerbund and
tussore silk trousers. By his side stood a heavy ebony
cane whose jade handle matched his jade cigarette-
case. And this person had been staring for quite a
long time while he smoked, drinking glass after glass
of cognac which apparently left him as sober as a
judge and as coldly critical — it was Beauvais. Oh,
yes, it was Beauvais come back from the wars with a
lung that a swallow of gas had injured, with a leg so
shattered and badly repaired that never again would
France need his service, with a mind half outraged
and half amused by the yarns with which nations
must dope their victims, but with hands that could
still hold a palette and brush to some purpose, and
with eyes that could still judge a woman.
Beauvais had said to himself: 'Why not? And
this time I think I will stay at la Tarasque. After all
I may build that sacre mas with the garden running
down to the sea and a pergola on which to grow
grape-vines. Quite a good proposition for a wounded
hero who has certainly earned his place in the sun!
Anyhow I will take a look at my land/ And so here
he was, breathing none too well while he smoked and
drank and stared at ^Eliana.
After awhile he got to his feet, helping himself
402