Interior France is even more remote, more secluded, more provincial, than agricultural England.

There no breath of the outer world intrudes.

All is laborious, circumspect, a trifle poverty-stricken, but beautified by an Arcadian simplicity.

Yet one memorable day, when walking by the banks of a river, he came upon three men dragging from out a pool the water-soaked body of a young girl into whose fair forehead the blunt knob often seen on the back of an old-fashioned axe had been driven with cruel force.

So, even in that tiny old-world hamlet, murder and lust could stalk hand in hand.
He shuddered.