“You have found a flower?” She looked up.

“Yes.  It grows at home, on my father’s farm.”

She dropped the faded shirt she was darning.  “Oh, tell me about your country!  I have talked to so many, but it is difficult to understand.  Yes, tell me about that!”

Nebraska—­What was it?  How many days from the sea, what did it look like?  As he tried to describe it, she listened with half-closed eyes.  “Flat-covered with grain-muddy rivers.  I think it must be like Russia.  But your father’s farm; describe that to me, minutely, and perhaps I can see the rest.”

Claude took a stick and drew a square in the sand:  there, to begin with, was the house and farmyard; there was the big pasture, with Lovely Creek flowing through it; there were the wheatfields and cornfields, the timber claim; more wheat and corn, more pastures.  There it all was, diagrammed on the yellow sand, with shadows gliding over it from the half-charred locust trees.  He would not have believed that he could tell a stranger about it in such detail.  It was partly due to his listener, no doubt; she gave him unusual sympathy, and the glow of an unusual mind.  While she bent over his map, questioning him, a light dew of perspiration gathered on her upper lip, and she breathed faster from her effort to see and understand everything.  He told her about his mother and his father and Mahailey; what life was like there in summer and winter and autumn—­what it had been like in that fateful summer when the Hun was moving always toward Paris, and on those three days when the French were standing at the Marne; how his mother and father waited for him to bring the news at night, and how the very cornfields seemed to hold their breath.

Mlle. Olive sank back wearily in her chair.  Claude looked up and saw tears sparkling in her brilliant eyes.  “And I myself,” she murmured, “did not know of the Marne until days afterward, though my father and brother were both there!  I was far off in Brittany, and the trains did not run.  That is what is wonderful, that you are here, telling me this!  We, we were taught from childhood that some day the Germans would come; we grew up under that threat.  But you were so safe, with all your wheat and corn.  Nothing could touch you, nothing!”

Claude dropped his eyes.  “Yes,” he muttered, blushing, “shame could.  It pretty nearly did.  We are pretty late.”  He rose from his chair as if he were going to fetch something....  But where was he to get it from?  He shook his head.  “I am afraid,” he said mournfully, “there is nothing I can say to make you understand how far away it all seemed, how almost visionary.  It didn’t only seem miles away, it seemed centuries away.”