“But I have gone before.  Don’t you remember the man whose wife was English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?”

“What will become of the house if you are killed?”

“Dear Marie,” said Sara Lee, “that is all arranged for.  You will send to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or some one else can come from England.  And you will stay on.  Will you promise that?”

Marie promised in a loud wail.

“Of course I shall come back,” Sara Lee said, stirring her soup preparatory to pouring it out.  “I shall be very careful.”

“You will not come back, mademoiselle.  You do not care to live, and to such—­”

“Those are the ones who live on,” said Sara Lee gravely, and poured out her soup.

She went quite alone.  There was a great deal of noise, but no shells fell near her.  She led the little horse by its head, and its presence gave her comfort.  It had a sense that she had not, too, for it kept her on the road.

In those still early days the Belgian trenches were quite accessible from the rear.  There were no long tunneled ways to traverse to reach them.  One went along through the darkness until the sound of men’s voices, the glare of charcoal in a bucket bored with holes, the flicker of a match, told of the buried army almost underfoot or huddled in its flimsy shelters behind the railway embankment.

Beyond the lines a sentry stopped her, hailing her sharply.

“Qui vive?”

“It is I,” she called through the rain.  “I have brought some chocolate and some soup.”

He lowered his bayonet.

“Pass, mademoiselle.”

She went on, the rumbling of her little cart deadened by the Belgian guns.

Through the near-by trenches that night went the word that near the Repose of the Angels—­which was but a hole in the ground and scarcely reposeful—­there was to be had hot soup and chocolate and cigarettes.  A dozen or so at a time, the men were allowed to come.  Officers brought their great capes to keep the girl dry.  Boards appeared as if by magic for her to stand on.  The rain and the bombardment had both ceased, and a full moon made the lagoon across the embankment into a silver lake.

When the last soup had been dipped from the tall boiler, when the final drops of chocolate had oozed from the faucet, Sara Lee turned and went back to the little house again.  But before she went she stood a moment staring across toward that land of the shadow on the other side, where Henri had gone and had not returned.

Once, when the King had decorated her, she had wished that, wherever Uncle James might be, on the other side, he could see what was happening.  And now she wondered if Henri could know that she had come back, and was again looking after his men while she waited for that reunion he had so firmly believed in.

Then she led the little horse back along the road.