"Monsieur le Count, I know, I know why it is that you go to America!" I made exclamation as I clasped to my breast my hands and my eyes shone with excitement. "I have read it in _Le Matin_ just the day before yesterday. You go to buy grain against the winter of starvation in the Republique. No man is so great a financier as you and so brave a soldier, with your wound not healed from the trenches in the Vosges. Monsieur, I salute you!" and I bent my head and held out my hand to him. "We're to expect nimble wits as well as courage of you young--shall I say _American_ women?" he laughed as he bent over my hand. "Now shall I not be led for introduction to the small brother and the old nurse?" he asked with much friendly interest in his kind eyes. It was a very wonderful thing to observe the wee Pierre listen to the narration of Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, concerning the actions of a small boy who had run out of a night of shot and shell into the heart of his regiment and who had now lived five months in the trenches with them. Pierre's small face is all of France and in his heart under his bent chest burns a soul all of France. It is as if in her death, at his birth, my beautiful mother had stamped her race upon him with the greater emphasis. "Is it that the small Gaston is a daredevil like is my Bob?" he questioned as we all made a laughter at the story of the Count de Lasselles concerning the sortie of the small idol from the trenches in the dead of one peaceful night to return with a very wide thick flannel shirt of one of the _Boches_, which he had caught hanging upon a temporary laundry line back of the German trenches. At that English "daredevil" word I was in my mind again back in the old Chateau de Grez and into my own childhood. "You young daredevil, you, hold tight to that vine until I get a grip on your wrist, or you'll dash us both on the rocks below," was the exact sentence with which my father bestowed my title upon me as he hung by his heels out of a window of the old vine-covered Chateau de Grez. "It is one large mistake that my _jeune fille_ is born what you call a boy in heart. _Helas_!" sobbed my beautiful young French mother as she regarded us from the garden below. "If you were a boy I'd thrash you within an inch of your life, but as you are a girl I suppose it is permissible for me to admire your pluck, Mademoiselle Roberta," said my father as he landed me in the music room by his side while an exchange of excited sentences went on between my mother and old Nannette in the garden below. "What were you doing out on that ledge, anyway? It is more than a hundred feet to the ground and the rocks."