Harry Corwin’s folks seemed little surprised.  Grace kissed him very tenderly, and his mother drew his head down and pressed his cheek close to hers.  “That will take both of my boys,” she said quietly.  In the conversation that followed at the dinner table Harry was struck with the familiarity with which they all spoke of the possibility that the boys would be taken into the service at once.  They had not discussed the matter in such detail before in his presence.  Grace mentioned more than once something that “the major said,” and Harry finally came to the conclusion that his people had been closer in touch with the matter than he had been.  Major Phelps saw a good deal of Grace.  Perhaps that had much to do with it.

The Bensons and the Foxes took the news less seriously.  “I guess it will be a long time before you boys see France,” said Mr. Fox.  “It is the right thing, though, and if you get a chance, take it.”

Louis Deschamps was to receive a bigger piece of news from his mother than he gave to her.

“Next week we leave for France, both of us,” said Mrs. Deschamps.  “I have not told you, Louis, for you were so happy with your work at the airdrome I wanted you to enjoy it while you could do so.  You are French, my son, and thank God you are becoming old enough to take a hand in the war.  When we get home I will see what can be done to place you at once in our own flying service.  If you have learned much here, as I think you have, it will all come in well when you are fighting for France.”

Louis was overjoyed.  He liked his comrades of the school, but he was, after all, a French boy and had a French boy’s heart.  More, he had a French mother, with a French mother’s devotion to her country and her country’s cause.

“For France!” an expression often heard in the Deschamps’ household, meant more than mere words could utter.  All the fine, high resolve; all the passionate belief in the justice of the French cause; all the stern determination that the war must be won, whatever the cost—–­all that went to make the magnificent French women of to-day the splendid heroines they have shown themselves to be, was deeply rooted in Mrs. Deschamps.  Her husband in the trenches, she might well have begrudged her only son, so young and such a mere boy in all his ways.  Not she.  She was a true mother of France.  The highest sacrifice was not too great to make for the republic.

So Louis was soon to leave the Brighton boys, to go on to France ahead of them, and to be enrolled in his own army, by the side of which his American school chums hoped one day to be fighting a common enemy.