The dust they made was very trying to the children.
With the heat and the long road they soon began to flag; Ronnie complained that the case he was carrying hurt his arm, and Sheila wanted a drink, but all the milk was gone.
Rose said her feet were hurting her.
Only the limp little boy in grey walked on without complaint.
Howard did what he could to cheer them on, but they were obviously tiring.
There was a farm not very far ahead; he turned into it, and asked the haggard old woman at the door if she would sell some milk.
She said there was none, on which he asked for water for the children.
She led them to the well in the court-yard, not very distant from the midden, and pulled up a bucket for them; Howard conquered his scruples and his apprehensions and they all had a drink.
They rested a little by the well.
In a barn, open to the court-yard, was an old farm cart with a broken wheel, evidently long disused.
Piled into this was a miscellaneous assortment of odd rubbish, and amongst this rubbish was what looked like a perambulator.
He strolled across to look more closely, the old woman watching him, hawk-eyed.
It was a perambulator in fact, forty or fifty years old, covered in filth, and with one broken spring.
But it was a perambulator, all the same.
He went back to the old lady and commenced to haggle for it.
Ten minutes later it was his, for a hundred and fifty francs.
She threw in with that a frayed piece of old rope with which he made shift to lash the broken spring.
Hens had been roosting on it, covering it with their droppings; he set Ronnie and Rose to pull up handfuls of grass to wipe it down with.
When they had finished he surveyed it with some satisfaction.
It was a filthy object still, and grossly expensive, but it solved a great many of his problems.
He bought a little bread from the old woman and put it with the cases in the pram.
Rather to his surprise nobody wanted to ride, but they all wanted to push it; he found it necessary to arrange turns.
'The youngest first,' he said.
'Sheila can push it first.'
Rose said: 'May I take off my shoes?
They hurt my feet.'
He was uncertain, revolving this idea in his head.
'I don't think that's a good idea,' he said.
'The road will not be nice to walk on.'
She said: 'But monsieur, one does not wear shoes at all, except in Dijon.'
It seemed that she was genuinely used to going without shoes.
After some hesitation he agreed to let her try it, and found that she moved freely and easily over the roughest parts of the road.
He put her shoes and stockings in the pram, and spent the next quarter of an hour refusing urgent applications from the English children to copy her example.
Presently Sheila tired of pushing.
Rose said: 'Now it is the turn of Pierre.' In motherly fashion she turned to the little boy in grey.
'Now, Pierre.
Like this.'
She brought him to the pram, still white-faced and listless, put his hands on the cracked china handles and began to push it with him.
Howard said to her: 'How do you know his name is Pierre?'
She stared at him.
'He said so - at the farm.'
The old man had not heard a word from the little boy; indeed, he had been secretly afraid that he had lost the power of speech.
Not for the first time he was reminded of the gulf that separated him from the children, the great gulf that stretches between youth and age.
It was better to leave the little boy to the care of the other children, rather than to terrify him with awkward, foreign sympathy and questions.
He watched the two children carefully as they pushed the pram.
Rose seemed to have made some contact with the little fellow already, sufficient to encourage her.
She chatted to him as they pushed the pram together, having fun with him in childish, baby French.
When she trotted with the pram he trotted with her; when she walked he walked, but otherwise he seemed completely unresponsive.
The blank look never left his face.
Ronnie said: 'Why doesn't he say anything, Mr Howard?