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hesitated for a moment before what he saw, and then advanced upon them with what was almost an air of leisure. He was quite a young man, in clothes so expressive of English casual elegance that one instantly conjectured him to be a foreigner. And confirmation of this appeared in the first words he spoke.
    ‘ Mille pardons! ’ the young man said – and as he spoke his glance travelled between Appleby and Ashmore, as if he were rapidly sorting them out. It was to Ashmore that he now made an expressive gesture. ‘ Je suis très, très confus ,’ he said.
    And he smiled with an easy charm which, on the contrary, didn’t in the least suggest embarrassment.
    It was in French that the young man continued for some minutes to explain himself. Appleby missed out a little on the beginning of this; his French was very adequate, but in face of really fast bowling, so to speak, he commonly took some time to play himself in. And the young man talked with a volubility which at the same time had the precision of well-bred speech; he didn’t appear to be in any doubt that Ashmore at least would follow him easily. It was when Appleby recalled Ashmore’s claiming – during that sinister recital – to have had a French mother, indeed, that what was being said now started to be fully intelligible. The young man’s name was Jules de Voisin; he had the happiness to be a kinsman of Mr Ashmore’s; he had come to pay his respects to one whose name was so much honoured in his own family.
    Appleby as he listened to this took a swift glance at Martyn Ashmore – Martyn Ashmore who like the man in Shaw’s play called himself the Celebrated Coward. His disaster would have been more bearable, he had said, had his mother not been French. Appleby glanced back at Jules de Voisin. Was it possible that his visit was malignly motivated, and that in his last speech there had lurked some vicious irony? Was it even possible –
    Appleby abandoned speculation so as not to let his French slip again. Monsieur de Voisin had come to the tricky part of his explanation – and if he saw the hurdle to be a high one he nevertheless took it like a bird. The house having appeared for the moment untenanted, he had reflected that here after all was the dwelling of a parent . And having chanced to come upon a side-door hospitably ajar, he had ventured simply to enter – not indeed to commit the impertinence of freely roaming the mansion, but simply in the hope of what he had in fact achieved: ascending to some point of vantage from which he could comprehensively survey those parterres , vergers and potagers – not to speak of le parc bien boisé – which had so delighted him as he made his approaches through his honoured kinsman’s domaine . And having said so much in a language eminently suited to refined compliment, young Monsieur de Voisin suddenly switched to the most colloquial English – this to admit his better sense that it really all had been the most tremendous cheek.
    Mr Ashmore distinguishably felt it to have been that – and so did Appleby. The French are a people rather formally disposed, and this young man’s behaviour could scarcely be viewed as other than odd. But Ashmore didn’t greet the outrageous intrusion with anything like the ire he had allowed himself at Appleby’s much more harmless trespass a couple of hours earlier. In fact he was detectably rather at a loss. It was as if the visitor had confronted him with a problem he couldn’t yet confidently assess. Was it conceivable that the turning up of a real Frenchman was stirring in Ashmore an uneasy knowledge that certain other Frenchmen existed only inside his own head?
    ‘May I ask,’ Appleby said suddenly, ‘whether you are running around on a motor-bicycle?’
    For an instant de Voisin seemed to hesitate, and then sufficiently accounted for this by a gesture suggesting that here had been an idiom he hadn’t at once understood. Which was fair enough, Appleby thought. The English