"Let me go!" she whispered. "I do not wish to live--I can't!--I
can't!"

Then he played his last card, and, holding her close, looked
straight into her eyes.

"France needs us all," he said.

She grew quiet. Suddenly the warm blood dyed her cheeks. Then,
drop by drop, the tears came; her sweet face, wet and flushed,
nestled quietly close to his own face.

"We will both live for that," he said; "we will do what we can."

For an hour she lay sobbing her heart out in his arms; and when
she was quiet at last he told her how the land lay trembling
under the invasion, how their armies had struggled and dwindled
and lost ground, how France, humbled, drenched with blood and
tears, still stood upright calling to her children. He spoke of
the dead, the dying, the mutilated creatures gasping out their
souls in the ditches.

"Life is worth living," he said. "If our place is not in the
field with the wounded, not in the hospital, not in the prisons
where these boys are herded like diseased cattle, then it is
perhaps at the shrine's foot. Pray for France, Lorraine, pray and
work, for there is work to do."

"There is work; we will go together," she whispered.

"Yes, together. Perhaps we can help a little. Your father, when
he died, had the steel box with him. Lorraine, when he is found
and is laid to rest, we will take that box to the French lines.
The secret must belong to France!"

She was eager enough now; she sat up on the bed and listened
with bright, wet eyes while he told her what they two might do
for her land of France.

"Dear--dear Jack!" she cried, softly.

But he knew that it was not the love of a maid for a man that
parted her lips; it was the love of the land, of her land of
Lorraine, that fierce, passionate love of soil that had at last
blazed up, purified in the long years of a loveless life. All
that she had felt for her father turned to a burning thrill for
her country. It is such moments that make children defenders of
barricades, that make devils or saints of the innocent. The maid
that rode in mail, crowned, holding aloft the banner of the
fleur-de-lys, died at the stake; her ashes were the ashes of a
saint. The maid who flung her bullets from the barricade, who
carried a dagger to the Rue Haxo, who spat in the faces of the
line when they shoved her to the wall in the Luxembourg, died too
for France. Her soul is the soul of a martyr; but all martyrs are
not saints.

For another hour they sat t