he black
war bread that lay beside his plate.

He saw her looking at his hand, felt in a flash that she regarded
it with favour, and instantly put it on his knee, under the
table.

"It is our trees that are worst," she went on sadly. "You have
seen our poor trees? It makes one ashamed for this beautiful part
of France. Our people are more sorry for them than to lose their
cattle and horses."

Mlle. de Courcy looked over-taxed by care and responsibility,
Claude thought, as he watched her. She seemed far from strong.
Slender, grey-eyed, dark-haired, with white transparent skin and a
too ardent colour in her lips and cheeks,--like the flame of a
feverish activity within. Her shoulders drooped, as if she were
always tired. She must be young, too, though there were threads
of grey in her hair,--brushed flat and knotted carelessly at the
back of her head.

After the coffee, Mlle. de Courcy went to work at her desk, and
Louis took Claude to show him the garden. The clearing and
trimming and planting were his own work, and he had done it all
with one arm. This autumn he would accomplish much more, for he
was stronger now, and he had the habitude of working
single-handed. He must manage to get the dead trees down; they
distressed Mademoiselle Olive. In front of the barrack stood four
old locusts; the tops were naked forks, burned coal-black, but
the lower branches had put out thick tufts of yellow-green
foliage, so vigorous that the life in the trunks must still be
sound. This fall, Louis said, he meant to get some strong
American boys to help him, and they would saw off the dead limbs
and trim the tops flat over the thick boles. How much it must
mean to a man to love his country like this, Claude thought; to
love its trees and flowers; to nurse it when it was sick, and
tend its hurts with one arm. Among the flowers, which had come
back self-sown or from old roots, Claude found a group of tall,
straggly plants with reddish stems and tiny white blossoms,--one
of the evening primrose family, the Gaura, that grew along the
clay banks of Lovely Creek, at home. He had never thought it very
pretty, but he was pleased to find it here. He had supposed it
was one of those nameless prairie flowers that grew on the
prairie and nowhere else.

When they went back to the barrack, Mlle. Olive was sitting in
one of the canvas chairs Louis had placed under the new pavilion.

"What a fine fellow he is!" Claude exclaimed, looking after