g conveyance but in vain.
Three of his friends had automobiles. He called them by
telephone. All cars had been commandeered. He stood with head
drooping in real dejection.

"Ah, I have it!" he exclaimed, "my friend Veilleau, he has an
aeroplane and he will do it."

This was quite too much even for Marie's soaring spirit; but she
scarcely had time to picture herself ranging the sky when Dumas
was back again, sorrowfully confessing failure. Aeroplanes likewise
had heard the tocsin; they had sterner business than wafting
lovers through the sky; they were carrying explosives and
messages in the service of France. Dumas looked almost as
disappointed as the wilted little figure he was trying to help.

When the villagers understood her plight, they were full of
sympathy, full of condolences, but also full of tales of arrest for
those traveling on the main road.

"Where was this road, anyhow?"

"Out there," they replied.

Turning a corner, we looked down the long row of poplars that
lined the main road to Melun.

Chapter XIII

America In The Arms Op France

Any poplar-fringed road in France holds its strange lure. Dignity
and grace lie in these tall swaying trees sentinelling the way on
either side. To the poet, it is at all times the way to Arcady. But at
eventide when the mystic light comes streaming from the west,
touching the billowing green into gold, then even to the prosaic
there is a call from the whispering, wind-stirred leaves to go a-
grailing and to find at the end the palace or the princess. This time
it was the prince who was calling. This little sad-featured girl was a-
tune to hear his call. Perhaps in the purple mist she could even
see her prince and feel the pleading of those outstretched arms.
Wistfully she looked down her road to Arcady; but how far away
the end and so bestrewn with terrors.

Are psychic forces subject to ordinary physical laws, and do they
act most powerfully along unobstructed ways? At any rate the
voltage was high in the psychic currents that swept the straight
road to Melun that afternoon, for when this saddened girl turned
from her long gaze down the road to Melun it was with a
transfigured face. Her tear-dimmed eyes shone with a calm
resolve and the uplifted chin foreboded, I perceived, no good to
my dreams of rest and resignation.

To know the worst I ventured: "Well, how are we going to get to
Paris?"

"You mean Melun?" she gently smiled.

"Sheer madnes