hardness and severity that was calculated
to frighten away her sensitive friend, rather than to bring him nearer
to her. She immediately wrote him a long letter, in which, for the
first time, she confessed her great love for him without reserve;
beseeching him in the most moving terms not to expose his life
recklessly, sending him all her prescriptions for rheumatism and chafed
feet, and entreating him to write to her at least once a week.

These weekly letters of his were now the only thing for which she
seemed to live, aside from the mere mechanical activity with which she
devoted herself to works of charity in the women's societies and on her
own account. She never appeared among her friends except on those
occasions when she had just received one of these letters from the
front, and then she came running to old Schoepf, her cheeks glowing
with joy, to tell him the latest news about Rosenbusch and Elfinger,
and to have pointed out to her, on the special map that Rossel had
given the old man, the exact spot where her lover must now be. But for
everything else she showed but slight interest, just as she seemed to
have completely lost her humor.

She was only amusing when she came to speak about the _francs tireurs_
and the treachery of the native inhabitants, by whom she was
perpetually imagining her lover attacked, plundered, maltreated, or
even killed, in spite of the red cross which she had made and sewed on
his coat-sleeve with her own hands. On these occasions she indulged
in such droll maledictions upon the Gallic national character,
and recounted such incredible instances of her own cowardice and
ghost-seeing, especially at night, that she finally had to join in with
the laughter of the others, going home again with her heart somewhat
lightened.

During all this war time she did not touch a brush. As nobody cared for
flower pictures, it was evidently a saving for her to cut up her canvas
and make use of it for sewing purposes, rather than to waste oil colors
on it.

She never allowed any of the camp letters that her tender-hearted lover
wrote her to be seen by any one else. They were love-letters, she said,
and not newspapers, and belonged to her alone. Once only did she
prevail upon her heart to part with one, in order to give her friend in
Florence a pleasant Christmas surprise, for Julie knew that she could
give away nothing in the world that was dearer to her than such a token
of life and love from the