The flier climbed stiffly out of his cockpit and stood among the others. He was relating something. Not able to hear a word, Célestine followed what he said, terribly, by the way his hands went. There had been a combat. Two planes high in flight--this the two hands showed--and then many, many attacking them. The two hands, in fight and flight, darted here, darted there, rose, fell, turned over, slid sidewise down, for a while stubbornly together. Then the two hands went apart--and the tale continued, told by only one hand--the tale of one plane only--of the teller’s own plane. That plane was alone, cut off, pursued by many, in dire distress; it twisted and strove like a moth in a flame. Finally it abandoned itself, it fell; fell long, forsaken and loose like a dead leaf--it was doomed. But no--abruptly, the descriptive hand, almost touching the earth, straightened out with a supple movement; the plane, at full speed, went scuttling along the heads of the wheat, the pursuit shaken off, free! The narrator halted. Again he shouted his question, fiercely, as though the violence of it might have potency in creating the right answer. But the others, all shaking their heads, stepped free from the plane and looked upward in the sky, toward the east. It was time for Célestine to go, but she could not go. In the field she remained, waiting--but out of the east no more planes were coming. The crying of the child in its carriage finally recalled her to herself. During the following days she saw that the young Frenchman was not flying; he loitered aimlessly among the sheds. He began to come to the inn. He would sit in a corner, looking fixedly at his table, drinking one glass of strong stuff after the other, till finally, told that the place was shutting up for the night, he would stiffly depart without a glance at the one who had spoken. Then one day he shook himself and rose after the first drink. And the following afternoon Célestine saw that he was flying once more, captain of a squadron of five. This, somehow, settled her last doubt, and when night had come, in a corner of the inn garden, she made a little grave. It was thus they did in her native village, in Brittany. There, when a fisherman, gone to the far banks of Iceland, did not return at the end of the season, little untenanted graves were made along the churchyard wall in memory of those who had thus vanished. Célestine made such a grave, in a corner of the garden where two thick stone walls met behind a thick chestnut tree. The recess was well hidden; few ever came there. She made a rectangular outline with white pebbles, drawing it thin so that one happening here should not quite be sure of what he saw; she bought a small Virgin of green porcelain and set it at the head. The little Virgin stood there always, a rosary drawn through her rudimentary hand, and with downcast eyes seemed to meditate upon the grave.