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There is nothing at first sight to keep the stranger longer, but if he will only stay for a week he will inevitably want to stay for a fortnight, and if once he has stayed for a fortnight, his business is done, and he is in love with Janenne for the rest of his natural life. Rural quiet has made her home in Janenne, and contentment dwells with her, sleepy-eyed.
And whilst she was warbling the door of the salle opened and in walked Laurent. 'Pardon, madame, he cried; 'do not permit me to interrupt you. But Annette had already risen from the piano, and had closed the lid of the instrument. 'My sister has gone to Janenne, he explained, 'and I am left breakfastless. You hungry rascals have not eaten everything, I hope?
But in the day when Our Lady of Lorette stayed the local pestilence the existing Count of Janenne was pious enough to ride in the promised procession; and for a century or so the magnate of the village and its neighbourhood was never absent from the demonstration of thanksgiving.
The annual procession is far and away the greatest event of the year at Janenne, and the septennial procession would of itself be enough to satisfy any resident in the village that he had lived if he had but seen it once. Nobody dreamed of spoiling the procession for the sake of a cart-load or so of gunpowder, and the hat was soon filled.
Years and years ago Janenne had a Count and a château. The ruins of the château still kept gray guard over the village street; but there is not even a ruin left of the old family.
The legends of the countryside tell of places in which no human life remained. The people of Janenne, headed by the doyen, made a pilgrimage in procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette, and offered to strike a bargain.
To begin with I went to Antwerp, thence to Brussels, and thence, by the merest chance in the world, to Janenne, a little village in the Belgian Ardennes, at no great distance from the French frontier. I had no idea of staying there, and on the surface of things there was no reason why I should have prolonged my stay beyond a day or two.
The scarred lime trunks had a bluish gray tone in the winter sunlight, and the carpet at their feet was of Indian red and sienna and brown, of fiercest scarlet and gold and palest lemon colour, of amber and russet and dead green. And everywhere, and in my tired mind most of all, was peace. I had been a fortnight at Janenne when my intrusive phantom left me on Lorette.
That same evening he is away to desk or counter or studio in Brussels, Antwerp, or Liège, and Janenne falls back into its normal peace. It was mid-December, and the snow was falling in powdery flakes, when a sportsman alighted at the Hotel des Postes, and at the first glance I knew him for a countryman.
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