ting a new
kind of happiness, a new kind of sadness. Ruin and new birth; the
shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of
beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life,
he saw.

When his hostess came back, he moved her chair for her out of the
creeping sunlight. "I didn't know there were any French girls
like you," he said simply, as she sat down.

She smiled. "I do not think there are any French girls left.
There are children and women. I was twenty-one when the war came,
and I had never been anywhere without my mother or my brother or
sister. Within a year I went all over France alone; with
soldiers, with Senegalese, with anybody. Everything is different
with us." She lived at Versailles, she told him, where her father
had been an instructor in the Military School. He had died since
the beginning of the war. Her grandfather was killed in the war
of 1870. Hers was a family of soldiers, but not one of the men
would be left to see the day of victory.

She looked so tired that Claude knew he had no right to stay.
Long shadows were falling in the garden. It was hard to leave;
but an hour more or less wouldn't matter. Two people could hardly
give each other more if they were together for years, he thought.

"Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get
through this war?" he asked as he rose.

He wrote it down in his notebook.

"I shall look for you," she said, giving him her hand.

There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the
edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he
stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the
sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the
glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop
which he would never find again.

The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front.
They had been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their
route by following the big road to the military cemetery, and
then turning to the left. It was not advisable to go the latter
half of the way before nightfall, so they took their time through
the belt of straggling crops and hayfields.

When they struck the road they came upon a big Highlander sitting
in the end of an empty supply wagon, smoking a pipe and rubbing
the dried mud out of his kilts. The horses were munching in their
nose-bags, and the driver had disappeared. The Americans hadn't
happened to meet with any Highl