What he really said was: 

“Mademoiselle’s papers?” He spoke quite amiably, a catlike pretense, no doubt.

Miss Falconer was no longer looking anxious.  Her hands were steady; she was even smiling as she produced two neat little packets that, on being unfolded, proved to have all the air of permits, laissez-passers, and police cards.  Two nondescript photographs, which might have represented almost any one, adorned them, and of these our sergeant made a perfunctory survey.

“Mademoiselle’s name,” he recited in a high singsong, “is Marie Le Clair.  She is a nurse, on her way to the hospital at Carrefonds.  And this is Jacques Carton, who is her chauffeur?”

A singularly stupid person, on the whole, he must have thought me, hardly fit to be trusted with so superb a car.  My mouth, I fancy, was wide open; I can’t swear that I wasn’t pop-eyed.  This last development had complete addled me.  Marie Le Clair!  Jacques Carton!  Who were they?

“I wish,” I remarked into the air as we drove on, “that some one would pinch me—­hard.”

She smiled faintly.  Now it was over, she looked a little tremulous.

“Oh, no,” she answered, “we were not dreaming.  Poor Georges!  I wish we were!”

Such was the incredible beginning of our adventure.  And as it began, so it continued.  We breakfasted at Le Moreau.  Miss Falconer ate in the dining-room of the small hotel; I sought the kitchen and, warmed by our late success, I did not shrink from playing my role.  Then we resumed our journey, and though we showed our papers twenty times at least as the control grew stricter, they were never challenged.  I rubbed my eyes sometimes.  Surely I should wake up presently!  We couldn’t be here in the forbidden region, in the war zone, plunging deeper every instant, in peril of our lives.

Yet the proof was thick about us.  In the towns we passed we saw troops alight from the trains and enter them; we saw farewells and reunions, the latter sometimes tearful, but the former invariably brave.  We saw depots where trucks and ambulances and commissary carts were filled, and canteens and soup kitchens where soldiers were being fed.  At Croix-le-Valois we saw the air turn black with the smoke of the munition factories that were working day and night.  At St. Remilly above the towers of the old chateau we saw the Red Cross flying, and on the terraces the reclining figures of wounded men.  It seemed impossible that sight-seers and pleasure-seekers had thronged along this road so lately.  The signs of the Touring Club of France, posted at intervals, were survivals of an era that was now utterly gone.

With the coming of afternoon, the country grew still more beautiful.  Orchards were thick about us, though the trees were leafless now.  The little thatched cottages had odd fungi sprouting from their roofs like rosy mushrooms; the trees and streams had a silvery shimmer, like a Corot fairy-land.