him.

"Louis? Yes. He was my brother's orderly. When Emile came home on
leave he always brought Louis with him, and Louis became like one
of the family. The shell that killed my brother tore off his arm.
My mother and I went to visit him in the hospital, and he seemed
ashamed to be alive, poor boy, when my brother was dead. He put
his hand over his face and began to cry, and said, 'Oh, Madame,
il etait toujours plus chic que moi!'"

Although Mlle. Olive spoke English well, Claude saw that she did
so only by keeping her mind intently upon it. The stiff sentences
she uttered were foreign to her nature; her face and eyes ran
ahead of her tongue and made one wait eagerly for what was
coming. He sat down in a sagging canvas chair, absently twisting
a sprig of Gaura he had pulled.

"You have found a flower?" She looked up.

"Yes. It grows at home, on my father's farm."

She dropped the faded shirt she was darning. "Oh, tell me about
your country! I have talked to so many, but it is difficult to
understand. Yes, tell me about that!"

Nebraska--What was it? How many days from the sea, what did it
look like? As he tried to describe it, she listened with
half-closed eyes. "Flat-covered with grain-muddy rivers. I think
it must be like Russia. But your father's farm; describe that to
me, minutely, and perhaps I can see the rest."

Claude took a stick and drew a square in the sand: there, to
begin with, was the house and farmyard; there was the big
pasture, with Lovely Creek flowing through it; there were the
wheatfields and cornfields, the timber claim; more wheat and
corn, more pastures. There it all was, diagrammed on the yellow
sand, with shadows gliding over it from the half-charred locust
trees. He would not have believed that he could tell a stranger
about it in such detail. It was partly due to his listener, no
doubt; she gave him unusual sympathy, and the glow of an unusual
mind. While she bent over his map, questioning him, a light dew
of perspiration gathered on her upper lip, and she breathed
faster from her effort to see and understand everything. He told
her about his mother and his father and Mahailey; what life was
like there in summer and winter and autumn--what it had been like
in that fateful summer when the Hun was moving always toward
Paris, and on those three days when the French were standing at
the Marne; how his mother and father waited for him to bring the
news at night, and how the very cornfiel