thing, even to keeping quiet. And the trip
can't go on a step without him now!

I felt that Jack Curtis had been hoping for a chance to speak with me
alone--about Jim. But there was no such chance then. We were met by two
of the British correspondents, and a French officer with a very high and
ancient title, who was playing host (for France) to the newspaper men in
this old chateau, once a convent. You see, the two cars had shot past as
we walked; and by the time we reached the door preparations were being
made for an impromptu party.

Never was a dinner so good, it seemed, and never was talk so absorbing.
Some of it concerned an arch of honour or a statue to be placed over the
spot where the first men of the American army fell in France: at
Bethelmont; some concerned a road whose construction is being planned--a
sacred road through Belgium and France, from the North Sea to Alsace; a
road to lead pilgrims past villages and towns destroyed by Germany.
This, according to the correspondents who were full of the idea, doesn't
mean that the devastation isn't ultimately to be repaired. The proposal
is, to leave in each martyred place a memorial for the eyes of coming
generations: a ruined church; a burned chateau; the skeleton of an
_hotel de ville_, or a wrecked factory; a mute appeal to all the world:
"This was war, as the Germans made it. In the midst of peace,
Remember!"

Beneath my interest in the talk ran an undercurrent of my own private
thought, which was not of the future, but of the past. I'd begun to
wonder why I had been afraid of Jack Curtis. Instead of dreading words
with him alone, I wished for them now.

After dinner I had but a few minutes to wait. When I'd refused coffee,
he, too, refused, and made an excuse to show me a room of which the
correspondents were fond--a room full of old trophies of the forest
hunt.

"Did you notice at dinner how I kept trying to get a good look at your
left hand?" Curtis asked.

"No," I answered, "I didn't notice that."

"I'm glad. I was scared you'd think me cheeky. Yet I couldn't resist. I
wanted to see whether Jim had given you _the_ ring."

"The ring?" I echoed.

"The ring of our bet, the year before the war: the bet you knew about,
that kept you two apart till Jim came over to France this second time."

"Yes--I knew about the bet," I said, "but not the ring. I--I haven't an
engagement ring."

"Queer!" Jack Curtis puzzled out aloud. "It was a race between Jim a