“It is sometimes necessary in war, Suzanne, to talk where one would not do so in peace,” replied Julie gravely, and then she said to John again in English: 

“We cannot carry out the pretense, Mr. Scott.  The tuneful or merry folk of the Middle Ages did not travel with arms.  They had no enemies, and they were welcome everywhere.  Nor did they travel as we do to the accompaniment of war.  The sound of the guns grows louder.”

“So it does,” said John, bending an ear—­he had forgotten that a battle was raging somewhere, “but we’re behind the French lines and it cannot touch us.”

“It was a wonderful victory.  Our soldiers are the bravest in the world are they not, Mr. Scott?”

John smiled.  They were still talking English.  He liked to hear her piquant pronunciation of it, and he surmised too that the bravest of hearts beat in the bosom of this young girl whom war had suddenly made a woman.  How could the sister of such a man as Lannes be otherwise than brave?  The sober brown dress, and the hood equally sober, failed to hide her youthful beauty.  The strands of hair escaping from the hood showed pure gold in the sunshine, and in the same sunshine the blue of her eyes seemed deeper than ever.

John was often impressed by the weakness of generalities, and one of them was the fact that so many of the French were so fair, and so many of the English so dark.  He did not remember the origin of the Lannes family, but he was sure that through her mother’s line, at least, she must be largely of Norman blood.

“What are you thinking of so gravely, Mr. Scott?” she asked, still in English, to the deep dissatisfaction of Suzanne, who never relaxed her grim glare.

“I don’t know.  Perhaps it was the contrast of our peaceful journey to what is going on twelve or fifteen miles away.”

“It is beautiful here!” she said.

Truly it was.  The road, smooth and white, ran along the slopes of hills, crested with open forest, yet fresh and green.  Below them were fields of chequered brown and green.  Four or five clear brooks flowed down the slopes, and the sheen of a little river showed in the distance.  Three small villages were in sight, and, clean white smoke rising from their chimneys, blended harmoniously into the blue of the skies.  It reminded John of pictures by the great French landscape painters.  It was all so beautiful and peaceful, nor was the impression marred by the distant mutter of the guns which he had forgotten again.

Julie and Suzanne, her menacing shadow, dismounted from the wagon presently and walked with John and Picard.  Lieutenant Legare was stirred enough from his customary phlegm to offer some gallant words, but war, the great leveler, had not quite leveled all barriers, so far as he was concerned, and, after her polite reply, he returned to his martial duties.  John had become the friend of the Lannes family through his association with Philip in dangerous service, and his position was recognized.