“But you do come,—­so many, and from so far!  It is the last miracle of this war.  I was in Paris on the fourth day of July, when your Marines, just from Belleau Wood, marched for your national fete, and I said to myself as they came on, ’That is a new man!’ Such heads they had, so fine there, behind the ears.  Such discipline and purpose.  Our people laughed and called to them and threw them flowers, but they never turned to look... eyes straight before.  They passed like men of destiny.”  She threw out her hands with a swift movement and dropped them in her lap.  The emotion of that day came back in her face.  As Claude looked at her burning cheeks, her burning eyes, he understood that the strain of this war had given her a perception that was almost like a gift of prophecy.

A woman came up the hill carrying a baby.  Mlle. de Courcy went to meet her and took her into the house.  Claude sat down again, almost lost to himself in the feeling of being completely understood, of being no longer a stranger.  In the far distance the big guns were booming at intervals.  Down in the garden Louis was singing.  Again he wished he knew the words of Louis’ songs.  The airs were rather melancholy, but they were sung very cheerfully.  There was something open and warm about the boy’s voice, as there was about his face-something blond, too.  It was distinctly a bland voice, like summer wheatfields, ripe and waving.  Claude sat alone for half an hour or more, tasting a new kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness.  Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw.

When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the creeping sunlight.  “I didn’t know there were any French girls like you,” he said simply, as she sat down.

She smiled.  “I do not think there are any French girls left.  There are children and women.  I was twenty-one when the war came, and I had never been anywhere without my mother or my brother or sister.  Within a year I went all over France alone; with soldiers, with Senegalese, with anybody.  Everything is different with us.”  She lived at Versailles, she told him, where her father had been an instructor in the Military School.  He had died since the beginning of the war.  Her grandfather was killed in the war of 1870.  Hers was a family of soldiers, but not one of the men would be left to see the day of victory.

She looked so tired that Claude knew he had no right to stay.  Long shadows were falling in the garden.  It was hard to leave; but an hour more or less wouldn’t matter.  Two people could hardly give each other more if they were together for years, he thought.

“Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get through this war?” he asked as he rose.

He wrote it down in his notebook.

“I shall look for you,” she said, giving him her hand.