Part 94

"I feel quite well." She looked up at him out of her honest grey eyes. "It is the happiest morning of my life," she said in a low voice.

"Why?"

"For two reasons: I am to remain with you, that is one reason; I have lived to see what I am looking at yonder, that is the other reason."

"You have lived to help what is going on yonder," remarked Halkett.

She turned, the question in her eyes; and he answered seriously:

"We British are your allies, now."

"Since when, Monsieur?"

"Since yesterday. So what you did for me when you saved my papers, you did for a friend to France."

Her sudden emotion left her silent; she bent her head and looked down at her knitting, and leisurely resumed it, sitting so, her legs hanging down from the wall, the sun striking her silver shoe buckles.

"Do you hear, Philippa?" asked Warner, smiling. "You have added reason to be proud of the wound on your lip."

She flashed a look at him, laughed shyly, and became very busy with her knitting and with watching the passing column across the river.

Halkett had unslung his field glasses to inspect them at closer range. The dusty fantassins were swinging along at a smart route step, rifles slung, red kepis askew, their bulky luggage piled on their backs and flopping on their thighs--the same careless, untidy, slipshod infantry with the same active, tireless, reckless, rakish allure.

Their smartly mounted officers, smartly booted or gaitered, wearing the smart tunics and gold-laced caps of their arm of the service, seemed merely to accent the gayly dowdy, ill-fitting uniforms of the little fantassins.

No British officer could, on his soul and conscience, subscribe to such flapping, misfitting, fag-ends of military accouterments; and as Halkett watched them a singularly wooden expression came over his pleasant, youthful features; and Warner, glancing sideways at him, knew why.

"They're very picturesque if a painter handles them properly," he remarked, amused. "You know what De Neuville did for them."

Philippa, not comprehending, continued to knit and to gaze out of her lovely grey eyes upon her beloved fantassins.

Ariadne, seeing her three friends aloft, presently mounted to the top of the wall beside them, and sat gravely blinking into space through slitted eyes.

A glazier had come across the fields from some neighboring hamlet, bringing with him under his ragged arm some panes of glass and a bag of implements.

He was in a hurry, because he was expecting that his class would be called to the colors, but the spectacle of the passing infantry across the river so fascinated him that he made but a slow job of it.

Toward noon a mounted gendarme, who seemed to know him personally, shouted, as he rode by, that his class had been called. The little glazier nodded, smeared the last strip of putty under the last window pane to be replaced, climbed down from the sill, lifted his hat to the three people on the wall--possibly including Ariadne in his politeness--and trotted away across the fields to tie up a few possessions in a large red handkerchief, and then trot away toward Chalons, where France needed even the humblest and most obscure of the children she had nourished through many years for such an hour as was sounding now.

Philippa, looking after him, was unconsciously stirred to express her thoughts aloud:

"There must be something I can do," she said.

"You have been among the very first to do something," rejoined Warner.

"Oh, that? That was nothing." She pursed up her lips and stared absently at the troops across the Recollette. "I can knit socks, of course.... I don't know what else to do.... If anybody wants me I am here."

"I want you, Philippa," said Warner.

"Mon ami, Warner----" She gave him a swift, adorable smile and laid her hand lightly on his arm for an instant.

Such candid gratitude for friendship he had never read in any eyes before; the quick response of this friendless girl touched him sharply.

"Of course I want you," he repeated. "Never forget, Philippa, that where I am you are welcome--not tolerated--wanted!"