“Eat, Mademoiselle,” she said, with something like authority, and Drusilla obeyed.  And when she gave back the bowl, the old woman set it on the floor, and drew the girl’s head to her breast.

And Drusilla lay there, crying softly, a lonely American mothered by this indomitable old woman of France.

Days passed, days in which men came and men went and Drusilla sang to them.  And now new faces were seen among the tired and war-worn ones.  Eager young Americans, pressing forward towards the front, found a countrywoman in the little town; and they wrote home about her.  “She’s a beauty, by jinks, and when she sings it pulls the heart out of you.  She’s the kind you want to say your prayers to.”

So her fame went forth and took on gradually something of the supernatural—­her tall, straight slenderness, her steady eyes, her halo of red hair grew to have a sort of sacred significance, like that of some militant young saint.

Then came a day when Derry’s regiment marched through the town to the trenches, spent an interval, and came back, awed by what it had seen, but undaunted.

Drusilla, sitting on the doorstep of the stone house, saw a tall figure striding down the street.  He stopped to speak to an old woman and doffed his hat, showing a clipped silver-blond head.

Drusilla went flying through the dusk.  “Derry, Derry!”

He stared and stared again.  “Is it you?” he asked.  Nothing was vivid now about Drusilla except her hair.

“Yes.”

He took her hands in his.  “My dear girl.”  It was hard for either of them to speak.

“Did Bruce McKenzie tell you that my Captain has—­gone West?”

“I had a letter.  I haven’t seen him.  His hospital isn’t far from here, I understand.”

“Just outside.  He—­he has been a great help—­to me, Derry.”

She took him back to her doorstep and they sat down.

“Tell me about Jean.”

He tried to tell her, wavered a little and spoke the truth.  “The hardest thing was leaving her.  I don’t mind the fighting.  I don’t mind anything but the fact that she’s over there and I’m over here.  But it had to be—­of course.”

“Yes, everything had to be, Derry.  I am believing that more and more.  When my Captain went—­I found how much I cared.  I hadn’t always been sure.  But I am sure now, and I am sure, too, that he knows—­”

“Love—­in these times, Derry—­isn’t building a nest—­and singing songs in the tree tops on a May morning; it goes beyond just the man and the woman; it even goes beyond the child.  It goes as far as the future of mankind.  What the future of the world will be depends not so much on how much you love Jean or she loves you, or on how much I loved and was loved, but on how much that love will mean to the world.  If we can’t give up our own for the sake of the world’s ideal then love hasn’t meant what it should to you and to me, Derry—­”