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The girl, bending above the water, suddenly struck sharply with her paddle. Instantly the man halted in his tracks, knee deep in clover. Maryette, apparently unconscious of his presence, continued to soap and scrub and slap her wash, singing in her clear, untrained voice of a child the chansonette she had made that morning.
And God knows Sainte Lesse had never seen the like! As for me I thought I was a child still until do you understand, monsieur?" "Yes, Maryette." "Yes, that is how I found I was grown up. He was a man, not a boy that is how I found out. So he became my first friend.
The old man was much alarmed, but his daughter followed beside him to the omnibus, in which were several lamed soldiers. "Et toi?" he quavered as they lifted him in. "What of thee, Maryette?" "I follow," she called out cheerily. "I rejoin thee " the bus moved on "God knows when or where!" she added under her breath. The airman was whispering to a fat staff officer when she rejoined him.
"I am doing that now. My ardent courtship will already be accomplished, so that we need not waste our hour together!" He began to laugh and wring out the linen. "Monsieur," she expostulated smilingly, "your apropos disturbs me. Have you the assurance to believe that you already appeal to my heart?" "Have I not appealed to it a little, Maryette?" The girl averted her head coquettishly.
The girl, Maryette, looked dumbly into the fading daylight when the cart stopped before her door. The airman took her gently by the arm, and that awakened her. As though stiffened by fatigue she rose and climbed to the sidewalk. He took her unresisting arm and led her through the tunnelled wall and into the White Doe Inn. "Get me some supper," he said. "It will take your mind off your troubles."
"He’s all shot to pieces, but they say he’ll pull through." The airman turned to Maryette: "Jack will get well," he translated bluntly. The girl, who had just refused the money offered by the American muleteer, turned sharply, became deadly white for a second, then her face flamed with a hot and splendid colour. One of the muleteers said: "Is this here his girl?" "Yes," nodded the airman.
After lunch she continued to be very busy in the laundry for a time, but the memory of those three little balloons above the aspens troubled her. Smith had gone on duty at the corral; Kid Glenn sauntered clanking into the bar and was there regaled with a bock and a tranche. "Monsieur Keed," said Maryette, "are any of our airmen in Sainte Lesse today?"
Two more bombs whirled down, bursting on a machine gun; then the airman turned with a cry of triumph, and at the same instant the sun rose above the hills and flung a golden ray straight across his face. To Maryette the man stood transfigured, like the Blazing Guardian of the Flaming Sword. "Ring out your Brabançonne!" he cried. "Let the Huns hear the war song of the land they’ve trampled! Now!
The sun was low; work in the garden had ended. Maryette had gone up into her belfry to play the sunset hymn on the noble old carillon. Through the sunset sky the lovely bell-notes floated far and wide, exquisitely chaste and aloof as the high-showering ecstasy of a skylark.
Between them they drew out a stretcher, laid the muleteer on it, and shoved it back into the vehicle. There was a brief consultation, then they both came back to Maryette, who, rigid in her seat and very pale, sat watching the procedure in silence. The gendarme said: "I go to Fontanes. There’s a dressing station on the road. It appears that your young man’s heart hasn’t quite stopped yet "
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