Marmaduke." Peggy seemed far away, and the name
still farther. He was deliberating whether he should say "_Appelez-moi
James_" or "_Appelez-moi Jacques_," and inclining to the latter as
being more picturesque and intimate, when she went on:

"_Tenez_, what is it your comrades call you? 'Doggie'?"

"Say that again."

"Dog-gie."

He had never dreamed that the hated appellation could sound so
adorable. Well--no one except his officers called him by any other
name, and it came with a visible charm from her lips. It brought about
the most fascinating flash of the tips of her white teeth. He laughed.

"_A la guerre comme a la guerre._ If you call me that, you belong to
the regiment. And I promise you, it is a fine regiment."

"_Eh bien_, Monsieur Dog-gie----"

"There's no monsieur about it," he declared, very happily. "Tommies
are not _messieurs_."

"I know one who is," said Jeanne.

So they talked in a young and foolish way, and Jeanne for a while
forgot the tragedies that had gone and the tragedies that might come;
and Doggie forgot both the peacock and ivory room and the fetid hole
into which he would have to creep when the night's march was over.
They talked of simple things. Of Toinette, who had been with Aunt
Morin ever since she could remember.

"You have won her heart with your snuff."

"She has won mine with her discretion."

"Oh-h!" said Jeanne, shocked.

And so on and so forth, as they sat side by side on the kitchen table,
swinging their feet. After a while they drifted to graver questions.

"What will happen to you, Jeanne, if your aunt dies?"

"_Mon Dieu!_" said Jeanne----

"But you will inherit the property, and the business?"

By no means. Aunt Morin had still a son, who was already very old. He
must be forty-six. He had expatriated himself many years ago and was
in Madagascar. The son who was killed was her Benjamin, the child of
her old age. But all her little fortune would go to the colonial
Gaspard, whom Jeanne had never seen.

But the Farm of La Folette?

"It has been taken and retaken by Germans and French and English, _mon
pauvre ami_, until there is no farm left. You ought to understand
that."

It was a thing that Doggie most perfectly understood: a patch of
hideous wilderness, of poisoned, shell-scarred, ditch-defiled, barren,
loathsome earth.

And her other relations? Only an uncle, her father's youngest brother,
a cure in Douai in enemy occupation. She had not heard of h