beside me, and then I will go into those trenches of France to give my life for my country, perhaps not as a soldier but as a good nurse of the Red Cross.  And never, never, must any living person who has loved Robert Carruthers know that he is a human of dishonor.  Nannette will be true to my directions to hide my secret, and wee Pierre will keep it forever because I go to fight for France as he cannot.  I will put with great firmness into the mind of Pierre that he is to be of a great devotion to my Uncle, the General Robert, through life.

“And what will you do for that great Gouverneur Faulkner, from whom each day you have stolen more and more affection with your false attitude of much loyalty, to keep from him grief at the loss of you?” I asked myself with a sob in my heart.

“Forgive me, my beloved chief.  When away from you I must die of a coldness,” I said to myself in a very low tone into the moonlight.

“Cold?  Do you want the whole blanket, youngster?  Snuggle into your cradle closer,” suddenly answered me my Gouverneur Faulkner as he reached his long arm across the tree trunk to tuck in the blanket about me and again he was immediately in the deep sleep from which my spoken words had but partly awakened him.  And then at his bidding I did settle myself down into the fragrant boughs and I wept myself also into a deep sleep.

The round sun was high over that Old Harpeth hill when I opened my eyes.  For a moment I did not see clearly and then I looked straight into the deep eyes of my Gouverneur Faulkner. which for that first time I had been able to see to be the color of violets in the twilight.  He was seated beside me smoking the fragrant pipe and looking down at me with a great wonderment that was mingled with as great a tenderness.

“Boy,” he asked softly, “are you sure God has got that pattern of you put away carefully in France?”

Before I could make answer to him a picture flashed into my mind.  When still a child one morning I opened my eyes to find my loved father bending over me and in the hollow of his arm he held my mother in her breakfast gown of lace and ribbons.  He spoke: 

“Some day, Celeste, a man will bend over her and watch her waken.  God grant it will be with the love—­that produced that beauty.  Look at that love curl!”

And at the recall of that picture of me into my mind, my hands flew to my face to find that same treacherous curl had descended to my cheek from the mop above.  With a fury of embarrassment I sprang to my feet from under that blanket.

“I have a great hunger,” I said as I observed a very crisp breakfast to be prepared upon the coals of the fire.  “I must have a fragment of bacon upon the instant.”  And I bent over the fire to obtain what I had demanded for a cover to my confusion.

“No, you don’t, until you’ve washed that face and those hands that still have the supper smudge on them, in the pool down there.  I left the soap and the dry sleeves and bosom of a flannel shirt for you.  Don’t you pack towels in a kit in your country?” With which laughing answer my Gouverneur Faulkner denied unto me an immediate breakfast.