“Ah, that was so extraordinary coming from a woman that you must pardon me for listening and making exclamation,” came an answer in a nice voice near at my elbow.  The words were spoken in as perfect English as I had learned from my father, but in them I observed to be an intonation that my French ear detected as Parisian.  “Also, Mademoiselle, are you young women of the new era to be without that very delightful but often danger-creating quality of curiosity?” As I turned I looked with startled eyes into the grave face of a man less than forty years, whose sad eyes were for the moment lighting with a great tenderness which I did not understand.

“I believe the quality which will be most required of the women of the era which is mine, is—­is courage and then more courage, Monsieur,” I made answer to him as if I had been discussing some question with him in my father’s smoking room at the Chateau de Grez, as I often came in to do with my father and his friends after the death of my mother when the evenings seemed too long alone.  They had liked that I so came at times, and the old Count de Breaux once had remarked that feminine sympathy was the flux with which men made solid their minds into a unanimous purpose.  He had been speaking of that war a few weeks after Louvaine and I had risen and had stood very tall and very haughty before him and my father.

“The women of France are to come after this carnage to mold a nation from what remains to them, Monsieur,” I had said to him as I looked straight into his face.  “Is not the courage of women a war supply upon which to rely?”

“God! what are the young women—­such women as she—­going to do in the years that come after the deluge, Henri of America?” he had made a muttering question to my father as his old eyes smouldered over me in the fire-light.

From the memory of the smoking room at the Chateau de Grez my mind suddenly returned to the rail of the ship and the Frenchman beside me, who was looking into my face with the same kindly question as to my future that had been in the eyes of my old godfather and which had stirred my father’s heart to its American depths and made him send me back to his own country.

“Ah, yes, that courage is a good weapon with which to adventure in this America of the Grizzled Bear, Mademoiselle,” I found the strange man saying to me with a nice amusement as well as interest.

“My father had shot seven grizzlies before his twenty-first birthday.  We have the skins, four of them, in the great hall of the Chateau de Grez—­or—­or we did have them before—­before—­” My voice faltered and I could not continue speaking for the tears that rose in my throat and eyes.

Quickly the man at my side turned his broad shoulders so that he should shield me from the laughing and exclaiming groups of people upon the deck near us.

“Before Ypres, Mademoiselle?” he asked with tears also in the depths of his voice.