We began to have that “gone” feeling about this time, and turned back through the town to E.M.’s house, where we were to lunch. It was cool and charming as we stepped in out of the sun-flooded garden, stripped of the mystery of the night before, but quite lovely. In old Lunéville china vases were masses of pink and purple canterbury-bells. It had been hastily but charmingly got ready for occupancy with old furniture that nice people in the provinces can put at the disposition of their friends, and I saw again Miss P., the Isolde of the dim, scented garden of the night before. After lunch we sat in an arbor jutting into a corner of the ancient park, drinking our coffee, and eating some Mirror candies just out from New York—all to the continued hum of _avions_ and the rather soft crack of guns. Then the motor was announced, or, to be faithful to reality, somebody said, “We’d better be off.” We put on our veils, got into the motor, which E.M. cranked herself, and started off to Vitrimont without any male assistance of any kind. CHAPTER IV VITRIMONT A merciless blaze of sun as we passed out through the town, badly battered at the end, through the Place Brûlée, leading to the road to Vitrimont, some three kilometers distant, running through green fields with their little groups of black crosses. All is softly green and gently rolling. Vitrimont, and around about it, was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of that first August of the war, and Vitrimont itself was taken and lost at the point of the bayonet seven times in one day as gray German floods kept rolling in over the green eastern hills. The village is charmingly placed on a little eminence; sloping down from it are very fertile meadows, then other thickly wooded hills slope up against the sky. We passed through encumbered streets of devastated, roofless houses, going first to Miss P.’s little dwelling, that she has lived in during all these months of the superintending of the reconstruction work. It consists mostly of one perfectly charming room done up in yellow chintz with a square pattern of pink roses, and some good bits of old furniture, books, and flowers. She took down from the wall a violin made by a convalescing soldier out of a cigar-box and drew from it a few soft and lovely tones. The rest of the house, where she has installed herself with a woman servant, is typical of the Lorraine peasant houses: a very wide door to let the harvest-wagons in, a narrow one for human beings, a narrow hall leading into a kitchen, then the bigger living-room giving into it, now so charming in its yellow chintz. From the kitchen some steep stairs lead up into an attic which Miss P. has converted into a medical dispensary.