“That speaks well for him.”

John’s mind traveled back to that modest house across the Seine.  It had done so often during all the days and nights of fighting, and he thought of Julie Lannes in her simple white dress, Julie with the golden hair and the bluest of blue eyes.  She had not seemed at all foreign to him.  In her simplicity and openness she was like one of the young girls of his own country.  French custom might have compelled a difference at other times, but war was a great leveler of manners.  She and her mother must have suffered agonies of suspense, when the guns were thundering almost within hearing of Paris, suspense for Philip, suspense for their country, and suspense in a less degree for themselves.  Maybe Lannes had gone back once in the Arrow to show them that he was safe, and to tell them that, for the time at least, the great German invasion had been rolled back.

“A penny for your dream!” said Carstairs.

“Not for a penny, nor for a pound, nor for anything else,” said John.  “This dream of mine had something brilliant and beautiful and pure at the very core of it, and I’m not selling.”

Carstairs looked curiously at him, and a light smile played across his face.  But the smile was sympathetic.

“I’ll wager you that with two guesses I can tell the nature of your dream,” he said.

John shook his head, and he, too, smiled.

“As we say at home,” he said, “you may guess right the very first time, but I won’t tell you whether you’re right or wrong.”

“I take only one guess.  That coruscating core of your dream was a girl.”

“I told you I wouldn’t say whether you were right or wrong.”

“Is she blonde or dark?”

“I repeat that I’m answering no questions.”

“Does she live in one of your Northern or one of your Southern States?”

John smiled.

“I suppose you haven’t heard from her in a long time, as mail from across the water isn’t coming with much regularity to this battle field.”

John smiled again.

“And now I’ll conclude,” said Carstairs, speaking very seriously.  “If it is a girl, and I know it is, I hope that she’ll smile when she thinks of you, as you’ve been smiling when you think of her.  I hope, too, that you’ll go through this war without getting killed, although the chances are three or four to one against it, and go back home and win her.”

John smiled once more and was silent, but when Carstairs held out his hand he could not keep from shaking it.  Then Paris, the modest house beyond the Seine, and the girl within it, floated away like an illusion, driven from thought in an instant by a giant shell that struck within a few hundred yards of them, exploding with a terrible crash and filling the air with deadly bits of flying shell.