She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle.  Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry with a bugle blew a quiet “All’s well.”  From somewhere near, on top of the mairie perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger, came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer for quiet sleep.

For two days the girl was alone.  There was no sign of Henri.  She had nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for his battered gray car.  In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor lorries—­she called them trucks—­piled high with supplies, often fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food.  Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers, detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers.

Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky.  She would look up, too, and there would be an aeroplane sliding along, sometimes so low that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust.

But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for.  Mostly they came at night, a steady stream of them.  Sometimes they moved rapidly.  Again, one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle impatiently round it and go on.  A silent, grim procession in the moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those two interminable days.

Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops—­a symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect—­inside those cars were wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care.  Surely, surely it was right that she had come.  The little she could do must count in the great total.  She twisted Harvey’s ring on her finger and sent a little message to him.

“You will forgive me when you know, dear,” was the message.  “It is so terrible!  So pitiful!”

Yet during the day the square was gay enough.  Officers in spurs clanked across, wide capes blowing in the wind.  Common soldiers bought fruit and paper bags of fried potatoes from the booths.  Countless dogs fought under the feet of passers-by, and over all leered the sardonic face of Jean Bart, pirate and privateer.

Sara Lee went out daily, but never far.  And she practiced French with the maid, after this fashion: 

“Draps de toile,” said the smiling maid, putting the linen sheets on the bed.

Sara Lee would repeat it some six times.

“Taies d’oreiller,” when the pillows came.  So Sara Lee called pillows by the name of their slips from that time forward!  Came a bright hour when she rang the bell for the boy and asked for matches, which she certainly did not need, with entire success.

On the second night Sara Lee slept badly.  At two o’clock she heard a sound in the hall, and putting on her kimono, opened the door.  On a stiff chair outside, snoring profoundly, sat Jean, fully dressed.