There was a girl who came under her care shortly before her baby was born. It was a fine little boy, fortunately the image of its mother. She had lost everything in the war, father, mother, home, and she clung passionately to her child. Only, at times, she wept bitterly thinking of the young soldier she had hoped to marry, and who was ignorant of what had befallen her. Madame de Ste. Croix looked up the young man, found his regiment, and arranged a meeting with him. His agony when she told him was great, but not for an instant was his allegiance to his sweetheart shaken. He had mourned her as dead and he blessed the noble woman who restored her to him again. “What has happened is not conceivably her fault,” declared this fine young soldier. “I love her more for what she has suffered. If I could I would marry her to-morrow and be a father to her child. But I am not sure that I can. I am not sure that it would be for her happiness.” With tears in his eyes the man told Madame de Ste. Croix that he was under twenty-five, and until after a man has passed that age he may not, according to French law, marry without the consent of his mother. This young man’s parents, he explained, were small town folk with a small town point of view. Their morality was a little narrow-minded, and he feared that they would never consent to his marriage with a girl who had suffered at the hands of the Hun. They would pity her, of course, but they would not want her for a daughter. They would never be able to love the child. “Let me go away now,” he implored, “and try to think what is best to be done.” A week later he returned with a radiant face. He had obtained leave and had gone home to see his mother. There, on his knees, he had told her a lie, one that must have been recorded in Heaven to his favor. He told her that he was the father of that girl’s baby, that he had wronged her, and now begged permission to right the wrong by marrying her. The mother’s reproaches were severe, and the poor young man had the pain of seeing her suffer for what she thought was his guilt. But after she had been induced to look at the baby’s picture her good heart was awakened. She agreed to the marriage and promised to love and care for the mother and child until the end of the war. This man was a simple soldier, a child of working people. He did not know that he was heroic, and in fact what he did has been matched by scores of men in France. Very often after the Germans violated women and children in the invaded towns and villages, they murdered them cruelly. Those left alive have been cherished by their men, only too thankful that they were spared. “Not that the men do not suffer,” said Madame de Ste. Croix. “We prize virtue and stainlessness in women. But we love justice more. And if this dreadful thing is hard on men whose betrothed are wronged, how much harder it is on a man whose wife has borne children to the brutal boche.