The sun fought against the approaching storm, straining from behind the gathering clouds. Even the golden August grass tried to blow the light away. Black and blue pulled the white clouds into its boiling mass. Red highlights on the thatched roofs were banished from the walls by heavy shadows, lost in the earth in puddles of muted green and brown. The barren road offered the only escape. Slashing toward the lighter blue horizon, it sped a straight line into the distance until it, too, was swallowed.

Jean-Luc stood at road's edge, studying the darkening horizon. With one hand gripping Phillipe's letter, he unconsciously pulled his collar tighter around his throat. "Phillipe, hurry," he said to the empty road. He forgot how long he had stood there watching the road disappear by inches and half listening to capricious strands of Debussy's "Le vent dans la plaine" snatched periodically away by sudden gusts. The thatch rustled and settled with a quiet thud against the aged, wooden frame. The harder he searched the less he could see and the more his imagination conjured.

"I must be going blind," he thought as he had observed the usually vivid colors of his small village eclipsed by the swollen sky: the startled fresh, white of the Cafe« Les Fleurs, the pale green grapes nestled in the darker green foliage of Jardins' vineyard, the weathered brown of his own roof, dimmed like his hope for Phillipe's safe return.

Solitary raindrops the size of francs spattered against the hard-packed road, and then painted the earth in frenzied pointillism. "Damn him and his passion for racing," he cried and ran to the cottage amid shutters slapping shut.