When they retraced their steps, the wood was full of green twilight.  Their relations had changed somewhat during the last half hour, and they strolled in confidential silence up the home-like street to the door of their own garden.

Since the rain was over, Madame Joubert had laid the cloth on the plank table under the cherry tree, as on the previous evenings.  Monsieur was bringing the chairs, and the little girl was carrying out a pile of heavy plates.  She rested them against her stomach and leaned back as she walked, to balance them.  She wore shoes, but no stockings, and her faded cotton dress switched about her brown legs.  She was a little Belgian refugee who had been sent there with her mother.  The mother was dead now, and the child would not even go to visit her grave.  She could not be coaxed from the court-yard into the quiet street.  If the neighbour children came into the garden on an errand, she hid herself.  She would have no playmates but the cat; and now she had the kittens in the tool house.

Dinner was very cheerful that evening.  M. Joubert was pleased that the storm had not lasted long enough to hurt the wheat.  The garden was fresh and bright after the rain.  The cherry tree shook down bright drops on the tablecloth when the breeze stirred.  The mother cat dozed on the red cushion in Madame Joubert’s sewing chair, and the pigeons fluttered down to snap up earthworms that wriggled in the wet sand.  The shadow of the house fell over the dinner-table, but the tree-tops stood up in full sunlight, and the yellow sun poured on the earth wall and the cream-coloured roses.  Their petals, ruffled by the rain, gave out a wet, spicy smell.

M. Joubert must have been ten years older than his wife.  There was a great contentment in his manner and a pleasant sparkle in his eye.  He liked the young officers.  Gerhardt had been there more than two weeks, and somewhat relieved the stillness that had settled over the house since the second son died in hospital.  The Jouberts had dropped out of things.  They had done all they could do, given all they had, and now they had nothing to look forward to,—­except the event to which all France looked forward.  The father was talking to Gerhardt about the great sea-port the Americans were making of Bordeaux; he said he meant to go there after the war, to see it all for himself.

Madame Joubert was pleased to hear that they had been walking in the wood.  And was the heather in bloom?  She wished they had brought her some.  Next time they went, perhaps.  She used to walk there often.  Her eyes seemed to come nearer to them, Claude thought, when she spoke of it, and she evidently cared a great deal more about what was blooming in the wood than about what the Americans were doing on the Garonne.  He wished he could talk to her as Gerhardt did.  He admired the way she roused herself and tried to interest them, speaking her difficult language with such spirit and precision.  It was a language that couldn’t be mumbled; that had to be spoken with energy and fire, or not spoken at all.  Merely speaking that exacting tongue would help to rally a broken spirit, he thought.