She was still crying bitterly; he wiped her eyes and talked to her as gently as he could.
The broad woman by him smiled serenely, quite unmoved by the disaster.
'It is the rocking,' she said in soft Midland French, 'like the sea.
Always I have been sick when, as a little girl, I have travelled.
Always, always.
In the train and in the bus, always, quite the same.'
She bent down. 'Sois tranquille, ma petite,' she said. 'It is nothing, that.'
Rose glanced up at her, and stopped crying.
Howard chose the cleanest corner of his handkerchief and wiped her eyes.
Thereafter she sat very quiet and subdued on his knee, watching the slowly moving scene outside the window.
'I'm never sick in motor-cars,' said Ronnie proudly in English.
The woman looked at them with new curiosity; hitherto they had spoken in French.
The road was full of traffic, all heading to the west.
Old battered motor-cars, lorries, mule carts, donkey-carts, all were loaded to disintegration point with people making for Montargis.
These wound in and out among the crowds of people pushing hand-carts, perambulators, wheelbarrows even, all loaded with their goods.
It was incredible to Howard; it seemed as though the whole countryside were in flight before the armies.
The women working in the fields looked up from time to time in pauses of their work to stare at the strange cavalcade on the highway.
Then they bent again to the harvest of their roots; the work in hand was more important than the strange tides that flowed on the road.
Halfway to Montargis the bus heeled slowly to the near side.
The driver wrestled with the steering; a clattering bump, rhythmic, came from the near back wheel.
The vehicle drew slowly to a stop beside the road.
The driver got down from his seat to have a look.
Then he walked slowly back to the entrance to the bus.
'Un pneu,' he said succinctly, 'il faut descende - tout le monde.
We must change the wheel.'
Howard got down with relief.
They had been sitting in the bus for nearly two hours, of which an hour had been on the road.
The children were hot and tired and fretful; a change would obviously be a good thing.
He took them one by one behind a little bush in decent manner; a proceeding which did not escape the little crowd of passengers collected by the bus.
They nudged each other.
'C'est un anglais...'
The driver, helped by a couple of passengers, wrestled to jack up the bus and get the flat wheel off.
Howard watched them working for a little time; then it occurred to him that this was a good opportunity to give the children tea.
He fetched his parcel of food from the rack, and took the children a few yards up the road from the crowd.
He sat them down on the grass verge in the shade of a tree, and gave them sandwiches and milk.
The road stretched out towards the west, dead straight.
As far as he could see it was thronged with vehicles, all moving the same way.
He felt it really was a most extraordinary sight, a thing that he had never seen before, a population in migration.
Presently Rose said she heard an aeroplane.
Instinctively, Howard turned his head.
He could hear nothing.
'I hear it,' Ronnie said.
'Lots of aeroplanes.'
Sheila said: 'I want to hear the aeroplane.'
'Silly,' said Ronnie.
'There's lots of them.
Can't you hear?'
The old man strained his ears, but he could hear nothing.
'Can you see where they are?' he asked, nonchalantly. A cold fear lurked in the background of his mind.
The children scanned the sky.