bbed of their
consolation; the baby is bundled into the house; and, once she is
safe--safe as any one can be safe in bombarded Nancy!--nobody thinks
about the air raid. _Que voulez-vous?_ If one thought about these
things, smiles a blonde girl in white, they might really get upon one's
nerves, and that would never do!

"It is this moonlight," she explains. "They will be back again once or
twice to-night, perhaps. But the streets will be as full as ever of
_poilus en permission_, walking with their sweethearts, in spite of the
hateful things!"

* * * * *

One makes one's adieux early in war times; but the moonlight was so
wonderful on that Taube-ridden night that Brian said he felt it like a
cool silver shower on his eyelids. "I believe I'm developing
night-eyes!" he laughed to me, as we walked ahead of the Becketts and
Julian O'Farrell, on our way across the gleaming square to our hotel.
"Surely there won't be another raid for an hour or two? Let's take a
walk. Let's go into the old town, and try to see some ghosts."

"Yes, let's!" I echoed.

I said good-night sweetly to the Becketts and stiffly to O'Farrell.
Brian was equally cordial to all three, and I feared that O'Farrell
might be encouraged to offer his company. But his self-assurance stopped
short of that. He went meekly into the darkened hotel with the old
couple, and I turned away triumphant, with my arm in Brian's.

The clock of the Town Hall struck ten, chimed, waited for the church
clock to approve and confirm, then repeated all that it had said and
sung a minute before.

We were going to look for ghosts of kings and dukes and queens; and like
ghosts ourselves, we stepped from moonlit shores into pools of shadow,
and back to moonlit shores again; past the golden Arch of Triumph, which
Stanislas built in honour of his daughter's marriage with Louis XV;
through the Carriere, where the tops of tall copper-beeches caught the
light with dull red gleams, like the glow of a carbuncle; past the
sleeping palace of Stanislas, into the old "nursery garden" of the
Pepiniere, to the sombre Porte de la Craffe whose two huge, pointed
towers and great wall guard the old town of Duke Rene II.

There we stopped, because of all places this dark corner was the place
for Nancy's noblest ghost to walk, Rene the Romantic, friend of Americo
Vespucius when Americo needed friends; Rene the painter, whose pictures
still adorn old churches of Pro