“Then—­the little house is still there?”

“Indeed, yes!  A very famous little house, indeed.  But it is always known as your house.  She has felt like a temporary chatelaine.  She always thought you would come back.”

Tea had come, as before.  The momentary stir gave her a chance to brace herself.  Mr. Travers brought her cup to her and smiled gently down at her.

“We have a plan to talk over,” he said, “when you have had your tea.  I hope you will agree to it.”

He went back to the hearthrug.

“When I was there before,” Sara Lee said, trying to hold her cup steady, “there was a young Belgian officer who was very kind to me.  Indeed, all the credit for what I did belongs to him.  And since I went home I haven’t heard—­”

Her voice broke suddenly.  Mr. Travers glanced at his wife.  Not for nothing had Mrs. Cameron written her long letters to these old friends, in the quiet summer afternoons when the sun shone down on the lifeless street before the little house.

“I’m afraid we have bad news for you.”  Mrs. Travers put down her untasted tea.  “Or rather, we have no news.  Of course,” she added, seeing Sara Lee’s eyes, “in this war no news may be the best—­that is, he may be a prisoner.”

“That,” Sara Lee heard herself say, “is impossible.  If they captured him they would shoot him.”

Mrs. Travers nodded silently.  They knew Henri’s business, too, by that time, and that there was no hope for a captured spy.

“And—­Jean?”

They did not know of Jean; so she told them, still in that far-away voice.  And at last Mrs. Travers brought an early letter of Mrs. Cameron’s and read a part of it aloud.

“He seems to have been delirious,” she read, holding her reading glasses to her eyes.  “A friend of his, very devoted to him, was missing, and he learned this somehow.

“He escaped from the hospital and got away in an ambulance.  He came straight here and wakened us.  There had been a wounded man in the machine, and he left him on our doorstep.  When I got to the door the car was going wildly toward the Front, with both lamps lighted.  We did not understand then, of course, and no one thought of following it.  The ambulance was found smashed by a shell the next morning, and at first we thought that he had been in it.  But there was no sign that he had been, and that night one of the men from the trenches insisted that he had climbed out of a firing trench where the soldier stood, and had gone forward, bareheaded, toward the German lines.

“I am afraid it was the end.  The men, however, who all loved him, do not think so.  It seems that he has done miracles again and again.  I understand that along the whole Belgian line they watch for him at night.  The other night a German on reconnoissance got very close to our wire, and was greeted not by shots but by a wild hurrah.  He was almost paralyzed with surprise.  They brought him here on the way back to the prison camp, and he still looked dazed.”