shrooms."

"Maybe."

"Aren't you going to put a stop to them?"

"Not I!" Claude jerked, setting the corners of his mouth grimly.
"If the girls, or their people, make complaint to me, I'll
interfere. Not otherwise. I've thought the matter over."

"Oh, the girls--" David laughed softly. "Well, it's something to
acquire a taste for mushrooms. They don't get them at home, do
they?"

When, after eight days, the Americans had orders to march, there
was mourning in every house. On their last night in town, the
officers received pressing invitations to the dance in the
square. Claude went for a few moments, and looked on. David was
dancing every dance, but Hicks was nowhere to be seen. The poor
fellow had been out of everything. Claude went over to the church
to see whether he might be moping in the graveyard.

There, as he walked about, Claude stopped to look at a grave that
stood off by itself, under a privet hedge, with withered leaves
and a little French flag on it. The old woman with whom they
stayed had told them the story of this grave.

The Cure's niece was buried there. She was the prettiest girl in
Beaufort, it seemed, and she had a love affair with a German
officer and disgraced the town. He was a young Bavarian,
quartered with this same old woman who told them the story, and
she said he was a nice boy, handsome and gentle, and used to sit
up half the night in the garden with his head in his
hands--homesick, lovesick. He was always after this Marie Louise;
never pressed her, but was always there, grew up out of the
ground under her feet, the old woman said. The girl hated
Germans, like all the rest, and flouted him. He was sent to the
front. Then he came back, sick and almost deaf, after one of the
slaughters at Verdun, and stayed a long while. That spring a
story got about that some woman met him at night in the German
graveyard. The Germans had taken the land behind the church for
their cemetery, and it joined the wall of the Cure's garden. When
the women went out into the fields to plant the crops, Marie
Louise used to slip away from the others and meet her Bavarian in
the forest. The girls were sure of it now; and they treated her
with disdain. But nobody was brave enough to say anything to the
Cure. One day, when she was with her Bavarian in the wood, she
snatched up his revolver from the ground and shot herself. She
was a Frenchwoman at heart, their hostess said.

"And the Bavarian?" Claude asked D