This was quite too much even for Marie's soaring spirit; but she scarcely had time to picture herself ranging the sky when Dumas was back again, sorrowfully confessing failure. Aeroplanes likewise had heard the tocsin; they had sterner business than wafting lovers through the sky; they were carrying explosives and messages in the service of France. Dumas looked almost as disappointed as the wilted little figure he was trying to help. When the villagers understood her plight, they were full of sympathy, full of condolences, but also full of tales of arrest for those traveling on the main road. "Where was this road, anyhow?" "Out there," they replied. Turning a corner, we looked down the long row of poplars that lined the main road to Melun. Chapter XIII America In The Arms Op France Any poplar-fringed road in France holds its strange lure. Dignity and grace lie in these tall swaying trees sentinelling the way on either side. To the poet, it is at all times the way to Arcady. But at eventide when the mystic light comes streaming from the west, touching the billowing green into gold, then even to the prosaic there is a call from the whispering, wind-stirred leaves to go a- grailing and to find at the end the palace or the princess. This time it was the prince who was calling. This little sad-featured girl was a- tune to hear his call. Perhaps in the purple mist she could even see her prince and feel the pleading of those outstretched arms. Wistfully she looked down her road to Arcady; but how far away the end and so bestrewn with terrors. Are psychic forces subject to ordinary physical laws, and do they act most powerfully along unobstructed ways? At any rate the voltage was high in the psychic currents that swept the straight road to Melun that afternoon, for when this saddened girl turned from her long gaze down the road to Melun it was with a transfigured face. Her tear-dimmed eyes shone with a calm resolve and the uplifted chin foreboded, I perceived, no good to my dreams of rest and resignation. To know the worst I ventured: "Well, how are we going to get to Paris?" "You mean Melun?" she gently smiled. "Sheer madness," I replied. "A carriage is out of the question, and if we had one there would be a hundred guards to turn us back." We stepped aside while two military trucks in their gray war-paint went lurching by. She followed them with her eyes until they disappeared into the distant haze where poplar and purple sky melted into one. "Going straight to Robert," she cried, clasping her hands, "and if they only knew how much I want to go, I don't believe they would refuse me." Preposterous as it was, if they could indeed have seen the longing in her eyes I felt certain they wouldn't either. Discreetly I refrained from saying so.