Claude grinned.  “Not especially.”

“You’d better brush up on it if you want to do anything with French girls.  I hear your M.P.’s are very strict.  You must be able to toss the word the minute you see a skirt, and make your date before the guard gets onto you.”

“I suppose French girls haven’t any scruples?” Claude remarked carelessly.

Victor shrugged his narrow shoulders.  “I haven’t found that girls have many, anywhere.  When we Canadians were training in England, we all had our week-end wives.  I believe the girls in Crystal Lake used to be more or less fussy,—­but that’s long ago and far away.  You won’t have any difficulty.”

When Victor was in the middle of a tale of amorous adventure, a little different from any Claude had ever heard, Tod Fanning joined them.  The aviator did not acknowledge the presence of a new listener, but when he had finished his story, walked away with his special swagger, his eyes fixed upon the distance.

Fanning looked after him with disgust.  “Do you believe him?  I don’t think he’s any such heart-smasher.  I like his nerve, calling you `Leftenant’!  When he speaks to me he’ll have to say Lootenant, or I’ll spoil his beauty.”

That day the men remembered long afterward, for it was the end of the fine weather, and of those first long, carefree days at sea.  In the afternoon Claude and the young Marine, the Virginian and Fanning, sat together in the sun watching the water scoop itself out in hollows and pile itself up in blue, rolling hills.  Usher was telling his companions a long story about the landing of the Marines at Vera Cruz.

“It’s a great old town,” he concluded.  “One thing there I’ll never forget.  Some of the natives took a few of us out to the old prison that stands on a rock in the sea.  We put in the whole day there, and it wasn’t any tourist show, believe me!  We went down into dungeons underneath the water where they used to keep State prisoners, kept them buried alive for years.  We saw all the old instruments of torture; rusty iron cages where a man couldn’t lie down or stand up, but had to sit bent over till he grew crooked.  It made you feel queer when you came up, to think how people had been left to rot away down there, when there was so much sun and water outside.  Seems like something used to be the matter with the world.”  He said no more, but Claude thought from his serious look that he believed he and his countrymen who were pouring overseas would help to change all that.

V

That night the Virginian, who berthed under Victor Morse, had an alarming attack of nose-bleed, and by morning he was so weak that he had to be carried to the hospital.  The Doctor said they might as well face the facts; a scourge of influenza had broken out on board, of a peculiarly bloody and malignant type.* Everybody was a little frightened.  Some of the officers shut themselves up in the smoking-room, and drank whiskey and soda and played poker all day, as if they could keep contagion out.