A cab drew up before me, and a Belgian officer with crutches was helped out by the cafe starter, who himself limped slightly and wore two medals on his breast.  First one troop and then another defiled across the Place l’Opera:  a company of infantry with bayonets mounted, a picturesque regiment of Moroccans, turbaned, of magnificently impassive bearing, sitting their horses like images of bronze.  Men of the Flying Corps, in dark blue with wings on their sleeves, strolled past me; and once, roused by exclamations and pointing fingers, I looked up to see a monoplane, light and graceful as a darting bird, skimming above our heads.

Even the faces had a different look, the voices a different ring.  It was another country from that of the days of peace.  Superb and dauntless, tried by the most searing of fires and not found wanting, France was standing girt with her shining armor, barring the invader from her cities, her villages, her homes.

Deep in my heart—­too deep to be talked of often—­there had lain always a tenderness for this heroic France.  “A man’s other country,” some wise person had christened it; and so it was for me, since by a chance I had been born here, and since here my father and then my mother had died.  I was glad I had run the gauntlet and had reached Paris to do my part in a mighty work.  An ambulance drove heavily past me, and with a thrill I wondered how soon I should bend over such a steering wheel, within sound of the great guns.

Leaving the cafe at last, I beckoned a taxi and settled myself on its cushions for a drive.  Each new vista that greeted me was enchanting.  The pavements, the river, the buildings, the stately bridges,—­all held the same soft, silvery tint of pale French gray.  In the Place de la Concorde the fountains played as always, but—­heart-warming change—­the Strasburg statue, symbol of the lost Lorraine and Alsace, no longer drooped under wreaths of mourning, but sat crowned and garlanded with triumphant flowers.

Like diminishing flies, the same eternal swarm of cabs and motors filled the long vista of the Champs-Elysees between the green branches of the chestnut trees.  At the end loomed the Arc de Triomphe, beneath which the hordes of the kaiser, in their first madness of conquest, had sworn to march.  Farther on, in the Bois, along the shady paths and about the lakes, the French still walked in safety, because on the frontier their soldiers had cried to the Teutons the famous watchword, “You do not pass!” Noon was approaching, and at the Porte Maillot I consulted Miss Falconer’s card.

“Number 630, rue St.-Dominique,” I bade the driver, the address falling comfortably on my ears.  I knew the neighborhood.  Deep in the Faubourg St.-Germain, it was a stronghold of the old noblesse, suggesting eminent respectability, ancient and honorable customs, and family connections of a highly desirable kind.  It would be a point in Miss Falconer’s favor if I found her conventionally established—­a decided point.  Along most lines I was in the dark concerning her, but to one dictum I dared to hold:  no girl of twenty-two or thereabouts, more than ordinarily attractive, ought to be traveling unchaperoned about this wicked world.