"Why not?" Margot’s eyes suddenly brightened. She eagerly sniffed the air of the forbidden avenue. The corporal, indicating with his white-gloved hand other Republican Guards posted at equal distances down the prohibited alley, and at its intersection with another some two hundred yards distant, brought his eyes back to Margot to answer: "Madame, for the reason that certain military operations are taking place here to-day." "But my husband is an English officer—" Margot was beginning, when Franky, reddening to his hat-brim, exhorted her to be quiet, and the Republican Guard, civilly saluting, stepped upon the grass and moved away. "All the same, you are an English officer," Margot persisted, "and what use is the Entente if that doesn’t count?" "Best child, don’t be a giddy goose!" Franky implored her. "You don’t suppose the Authorities care a bad tomato for an English Loot—what they’d cotton to would have to be a British Brass Hat of the very biggest kind. Look there!—more to your left, little battums!" He indicated yet other Republican cocked hats strung at equal distances down the length of a neighbouring alley, precisely outlining the farther border of the sandwich-shaped halfacre of greensward by which their particular avenue ran. "And there!" His professional eye had noted a big, grey-painted military motor-lorry, numbered, and lettered "S. Aë. F." Behind the driver’s seat towered the slender T-shaped steel mast of a Field wireless, whose spidery aerials, pegged to the turf, were in charge of men in _képis_ and blue overalls, while a non-commissioned officer, wearing the telephone head-band of the operator, leaned on the elbow-rest of the tripod supporting the apparatus, his finger on the buzzer-key. Near him his clerk squatted, pencil and pad in readiness, while at a respectful distance from two oblong patches of white in the middle of the green plat of turf, several active upright figures in dark uniforms stood conversing, or walking to and fro. "_Officiers Aviateurs_, telegraphists and mechanics of the French _Service Aëronautique_"—you are listening to Franky—"tremendously well-organised compared with our little footling Flying Corps, tinkered fourteen months ago out of the old Air Battalion of the R. E. These chaps are Engineers—goin’ by the dark red double stripes on their overalls and their dark blue _képis_. Some of their machines’ll be out for practice. Despatch-droppin’ or bombs. Here’s a man with brass on his hat, coming our way.... Takes me for a German soger-orficer I shouldn’t wonder!—lots of ’em get their clothes cut in Bond Street. But though you can hide Allemand legs in English trousers"—Franky was recovering his customary cheeriness—"and some of ’em do it uncommon cleverly—you can’t deodorise an accent that hails from Berlin."