The House of Adventure

Two stragglers lay sleeping in an orchard near the village of Beaucourt sprawling upon a grass bank under the branches of an old apple tree. The sun had cleared the horizon and hung as a great yellow disc in the purple boughs of the beech trees on the other side of the stream. Overhead stretched the thin and cloudless blue of a March sky. The grass was silvered with hoar-frost—and in the wood across the stream a bird was singing.