We fell upon the one village gendarme with a volley of questions.  By pitching her voice above the hubbub, Marie got in her inquiry about the distance to Melun.

“Thirty kilometers by the main road,” he answered.

This, then, was the issue of that tense day of strategy and daring:  to be stranded in this suburb from which it was impossible to go forward to Melun and almost as difficult to return to Paris.  Marie crumpled under the blow and then I realized how much it had cost her to maintain that calm outward demeanor.

By sheer will-power she had kept the tears from her eyes and the tremor from her limbs.  Long held in leash, they now leaped out to possess her.

Dumas ran hither and thither, hunting conveyance but in vain.  Three of his friends had automobiles.  He called them by telephone.  All cars had been commandeered.  He stood with head drooping in real dejection.

“Ah, I have it!” he exclaimed, “my friend Veilleau, he has an aeroplane and he will do it.”

This was quite too much even for Marie’s soaring spirit; but she scarcely had time to picture herself ranging the sky when Dumas was back again, sorrowfully confessing failure.  Aeroplanes likewise had heard the tocsin; they had sterner business than wafting lovers through the sky; they were carrying explosives and messages in the service of France.  Dumas looked almost as disappointed as the wilted little figure he was trying to help.

When the villagers understood her plight, they were full of sympathy, full of condolences, but also full of tales of arrest for those traveling on the main road.

“Where was this road, anyhow?”

“Out there,” they replied.

Turning a corner, we looked down the long row of poplars that lined the main road to Melun.

Chapter XIII

America In The Arms Op France

Any poplar-fringed road in France holds its strange lure.  Dignity and grace lie in these tall swaying trees sentinelling the way on either side.  To the poet, it is at all times the way to Arcady.  But at eventide when the mystic light comes streaming from the west, touching the billowing green into gold, then even to the prosaic there is a call from the whispering, wind-stirred leaves to go a-grailing and to find at the end the palace or the princess.  This time it was the prince who was calling.  This little sad-featured girl was a-tune to hear his call.  Perhaps in the purple mist she could even see her prince and feel the pleading of those outstretched arms.  Wistfully she looked down her road to Arcady; but how far away the end and so bestrewn with terrors.

Are psychic forces subject to ordinary physical laws, and do they act most powerfully along unobstructed ways?  At any rate the voltage was high in the psychic currents that swept the straight road to Melun that afternoon, for when this saddened girl turned from her long gaze down the road to Melun it was with a transfigured face.  Her tear-dimmed eyes shone with a calm resolve and the uplifted chin foreboded, I perceived, no good to my dreams of rest and resignation.