Since the men were all afield, Mrs. Wheeler now went every morning to the mailbox at the crossroads, a quarter of a mile away, to get yesterday’s Omaha and Kansas City papers which the carrier left.  In her eagerness she opened and began to read them as she turned homeward, and her feet, never too sure, took a wandering way among sunflowers and buffaloburrs.  One morning, indeed, she sat down on a red grass bank beside the road and read all the war news through before she stirred, while the grasshoppers played leap-frog over her skirts, and the gophers came out of their holes and blinked at her.  That noon, when she saw Claude leading his team to the water tank, she hurried down to him without stopping to find her bonnet, and reached the windmill breathless.

“The French have stopped falling back, Claude.  They are standing at the Marne.  There is a great battle going on.  The papers say it may decide the war.  It is so near Paris that some of the army went out in taxi-cabs.”  Claude drew himself up.  “Well, it will decide about Paris, anyway, won’t it?  How many divisions?”

“I can’t make out.  The accounts are so confusing.  But only a few of the English are there, and the French are terribly outnumbered.  Your father got in before you, and he has the papers upstairs.”

“They are twenty-four hours old.  I’ll go to Vicount tonight after I’m done work, and get the Hastings paper.”

In the evening, when he came back from town, he found his father and mother waiting up for him.  He stopped a moment in the sitting-room.  “There is not much news, except that the battle is on, and practically the whole French army is engaged.  The Germans outnumber them five to three in men, and nobody knows how much in artillery.  General Joffre says the French will fall back no farther.”  He did not sit down, but went straight upstairs to his room.

Mrs. Wheeler put out the lamp, undressed, and lay down, but not to sleep.  Long afterward, Claude heard her gently closing a window, and he smiled to himself in the dark.  His mother, he knew, had always thought of Paris as the wickedest of cities, the capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people, who were responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and for the grinning atheist, Voltaire.  For the last two weeks, ever since the French began to fall back in Lorraine, he had noticed with amusement her growing solicitude for Paris.

It was curious, he reflected, lying wide awake in the dark:  four days ago the seat of government had been moved to Bordeaux,—­with the effect that Paris seemed suddenly to have become the capital, not of France, but of the world!  He knew he was not the only farmer boy who wished himself tonight beside the Marne.  The fact that the river had a pronounceable name, with a hard Western “r” standing like a keystone in the middle of it, somehow gave one’s imagination a firmer hold on the situation.  Lying still and thinking fast, Claude