I was content to go no nearer.  It was no army returning.  It was only a small detachment.  Still, I could not help feeling that if any of them were returning in that spirit, while the cannon were still booming, all must be well.

Amelie ran all the way to the Demi-Lune—­a little more than a quarter of a mile.  I could see her simply flying over the ground.  I waited where I was until she came back, crying breathlessly, long before she reached me: 

“Oh, madame, what do you think?  The regiment which was here yesterday captured a big, big cannon.”

That was good news.  They really had not looked it.

“And oh, madame,” she went on, as she reached me, “the war is over.  The Germans have asked for peace,” and she sat right down on the ground.

“Peace?” I exclaimed.  “Where?  Who told you that?”

“A man out there.  He heard it from a soldier.  They have asked for peace, those Boches, and General Gallieni, he told them to go back to their own frontier, and ask for it there.”

“And have they gone, Amelie?” I asked.

She replied quite seriously that they were going, and she was terribly hurt because I laughed, and remarked that I hoped they would not be too long about it.

I had the greatest possible difficulty in making her realize that we were only hearing a very small part of a battle, which, judging by the movements which had preceded it, was possibly extending from here to the vicinity of Verdun, where the Crown Prince was said to be vainly endeavoring to break through, his army acting as a sort of a pivot on which the great advance had swung.  I could not help wondering if, as often happens in the game of “snap the whip,” von Kluck’s right wing had got swung off the line by the very rapidity with which it must have covered that long arc in the great two weeks’ offensive.

Amelie, who has an undue confidence in my opinion, was terribly disappointed, quite downcast.  Ever since the British landed—­she has such faith in the British—­she has believed in a short war.  Of course I don’t know any more than she does.  I have to guess, and I’m not a lucky guesser as a rule.  I confess to you that even I am absolutely obsessed by the miracle which has turned the invaders back from the walls of Paris.  I cannot get over the wonder of it.  In the light of the sudden, unexpected pause in that great push I have moments of believing that almost anything can happen.  I’ll wager you know more about it on your side of the great pond than we do here within hearing of the battle.

I don’t even know whether it is true or not that Gallieni is out there.  If it is, that must mean that the army covering Paris has advanced, and that Joffre has called out his reserves which have been entrenched all about the seventy-two miles of steel that guards the capital.  I wondered then, and today—­seven days later—­I am wondering still.

It was useless to give these conjectures to Amelie.  She was too deep in her disappointment.  She walked sadly beside me back to the garden, an altogether different person from the one who had come racing across the field in the sunshine.  Once there, however, she braced up enough to say: