“I can believe it was necessary and, therefore, best,” Lady Agnes said. “Yet I can’t stop being sorry--not merely for our general officers, but for our men, too. Poor chaps who come to me; they’ve fought so finely for England; and now the Boche are boasting they’ve whipped them and beaten England. They everyone of them are so eager to get well, and go back, and have at them again, and rather show the Boche that they’ve not--rather show them that England will have them! Now we’ll not be under our own command; yet we’ll be fighting just the same for England; the Boche shall find that England will have them!” “You’ll have them!” Gerry assured. “And far quicker than you could have before.” Lady Agnes observed him, a little puzzled. “You used to say ‘we’ when you spoke of us,” she said gently. Gerry flushed. “I was in your army then,” he replied. “You’re fighting with us now--wonderfully, Gerry.” “Yes; but technically you see, Agnes, I’m with my own forces.” He said “my own” with a tone of distinction which surprised himself. His own forces, except for a few comrade pilots, and for those engineers who had grabbed rifles, and got into this battle, and except for those girls--those “awfully good” girls of Picardy--still were only in training in France or holding down quiet sectors in Lorraine. But Gerry had been in one of those sectors which had not been so noted for its tranquillity after “his own” forces had arrived. However, he was not thinking of those forces just then; he was recalling an American girl who had come to him across open ground in the sunlight and under machine-gun fire. For a moment he visualized her as she stumbled and rolled forward, when he thought she was hit; then he saw her close beside him with the sun on her glorious hair and her eyes all anxious for him. Words of hers came to him when Lady Agnes was speaking again her regret that the English could not have kept their own command. “Oh, I don’t know how to say it!” that American girl’s words repeated themselves to Gerry; she was in a yellow dress now, with bare arms and neck, and quite warm and flushed with her intentness to explain to him something he could not understand at all. “But at first France was fighting as France and for France against Germany; and England, for England, was doing the same. And America couldn’t do that--I mean fight for America. She couldn’t join with allies who were fighting for themselves, or even for each other. The side of the allies had to become more than that before we could go in; and it is and we’re in!” Gerry was understanding that better, now. This unification of the command, and the yielding of the British was their greatest earnest of that change which Cynthia Gail had felt before, and gloried in, and which Agnes Ertyle accepted but yet deplored.