We had some little difficulty reassuring her, but when her prodigal grandson sat up and asked for bread and jam, she forgot her anxiety and began scolding him for daring to give her such a fright, and us so much trouble.

* * * *

Towards the end of the third week in August the mobilization was considered finished and the Eastern Railroad opened again to the public; its time tables of course being limited and subject to instant change, the company refusing to be responsible for delays.  To us at the chateau this meant very little, save that we would receive our mail and the daily papers more frequently.  However, several friends who fancied I was unsafe alone and so far from the capital, kindly ventured to start to Villiers to try to persuade me to come up to town.  It took them seven hours to reach Meaux (thirty miles from Paris); they were obliged to sleep there because it was because it was announced that their train went no further—­and worse than all, they were eighteen hours getting home.

“Wheren’t people furious?” I questioned, when afterwards they told me of their adventure.

“Not in the slightest.  Everyone bore it patiently as part of his tribute to his country.  ‘The army first’ was their motto.”

The first batch of mail brought me any number of stale letters, which had arrived and been held in Paris over three weeks.  Invitations to a house party in Belgium and things of that kind that seemed so strangely out of place now.  The two most important documents, however, came, one from my cousin, Marie Huard (Superior at the Convent of the Infant Jesus at Madrid) and the other from Elizabeth Gauthier.

My cousin had taken upon herself to locate and communicate with every member of the Huard family called to arms (and they are numerous, when one considers that H. has no less than twelve married uncles!) and she enclosed me a sort of map, or family tree, indicating the names, ages, regiments, etc., of some fifty cousins, begging me to write and encourage them from time to time.

Elizabeth Gauthier’s letter bore a black border—­and I trembled as I opened it.  She was in Paris alone, and mourning the loss of her eldest brother, killed at the battle of Mulhouse, the ninth of August.  Her solitude preyed upon her, and she announced her departure for her sister’s chateau in Burgundy.

That was the first real sadness that the war had brought me so far.  It quite upset me, for Jean Bernard was not only a delightful friend, but one of the most promising engineers of the younger generation in France.  Both family, friends and country might well deplore such a loss.

Even the making and hoisting of a huge Red Cross flag over the chateau failed to arouse my enthusiasm all that day.  The blow was too cruel and had stimulated fears which heretofore had lain dormant within me.

The next day, however, I was not permitted to brood over my grief, for Yvonne (she of the poultry farm) fell ill with a severe attack of sciatica, which kept her in her bed, every movement producing a scream of agony.