made great preparations over the setting of the meal. They had forgotten
nothing. When they sat down, the Bearskin upon the step of the motor,
the others cross-legged upon the ground, each man had a napkin as big as
a sheet spread across the surface of his coat and waistcoat, and tied
into the band of the overcoat at the side. Bottles of red wine, and a
bottle of white to finish with, lay on a cloth spread upon the grass.
Bread, cheese, sausage, _pate_, and a slab of chocolate; knives, forks
and a china cup apiece. Fanny, who had taken her own uneatable lunch
from the garage, was made to eat some of theirs. They were on a high,
dry, open plateau of land, and the winter sun, not strong enough to
break the frost, faintly warmed their necks and hands and the round
bodies of the bottles.

It was not unpleasant sitting there with the three white-chested
strangers, watching the sky through the prongs of the bare hedge,
spreading _pate_ on to fresh bread, and balancing her cup half full of
red wine among the fibres and roots of the grass.

"Now that I have started I am well on my way to getting back," she
thought, and found that within her breast the black despair of the
morning had melted. She watched her companions for amusement.

The Bearskin, cumbrous, high-coloured, and blue-eyed, looked like an
innkeeper in an English tavern. When he took off his cloth hood she
thought she had never seen anything so staring as the pink of his face
against the blue of his cap; but when the cap came off too for a second
that he might stir his forehead with his finger, the blaze and crackle
of his red hair beneath was even more ferocious. Yet he seemed
intimidated by his companions, and kept silence, eating meekly from his
knife, and spreading his napkin with care to the edge of his knees.