“But I don’t understand,” she almost pleaded, staring again at his white hair and the little flag in his hatband that looked so oddly like a cockade. “You say you sail to-morrow with my boy?” “I think you understand as well as any one.” “Do I?” she whispered. And the night suddenly seemed cold and she drew her little shawl of Shetland wool more tightly about her shoulders. Yet she was not afraid. Her guest stooped and, rising, put one of her sweet-smelling clove-pinks in his button-hole. “If you permit, I will carry it for your boy to France. We are extra men, supercargo,” he went on. “We shall cross with every boat-load of boys who sail for France—we who fought once as they must fight now. They said of me, only too flatteringly, that I was first in peace. Now I must be first in war again. I must be on the first troop-ship that goes. And I shall find friends in France. We have always had friends in France, I imagine, since those first days. Of course, madam, you are too young to remember the Marquis de la Fayette.” “Yes, I am too young,” answered old Mrs. Buchan. And she smiled through her tears at the thought of her eighty years. “You’re a mere chit of a girl, of course,” he laughed—one of the few times his gravity was relaxed. “Shall I know your boy, I wonder?” Then, without waiting for her answer, “The George Buchan who fought at the battle of Princeton was about twenty-two, slim and straight, with blue eyes and brown hair and an honest, gallant way with him, and a smile that one remembered.” “You will know my boy,” she told him. “And I think he will know you, General.” Even now she swears she does not quite know what she meant by this. The magic of the June night had for the moment made everything possible. Yet she will not to this day say who she thinks the horseman may have been. Only that George would know him, as she had. “I want them all to know that I am there,” he had replied. “They will know. They will remember their country’s history even as we remember. And when the shells scream in the French sky they will not forget the many times America has fought for liberty. They will not forget those early soldiers. And they will not forget Grant and Lee and Lincoln. The American eagle, madam, has a very shrill note. I think it can be heard above the whistle of German shrapnel.” ―――― He drank a glass of sherry before he went, and ate a slice of sponge-cake. Perhaps altogether he delayed a scant quarter of an hour. The lean horses came streaming forth from the green meadow, a long, long file; and while the moon and the river mist still made it a world of wonder, the company, larger somehow than she had thought it at first, clattered off up the Princeton road toward New York and salt water and the ships.