"How strangely the Lord moves, his wonders to perform," misquoted
Barbara. "Had not the Young Man of Wall Street saved Mr. Hastings, Mr.
Hastings could not have raised your salary; you would not have asked me
to marry you, and had you not asked me to marry you, father would not
have given me a wedding-present, and--"
"And," said Champ, taking up the tale, "thousands of slaves would still
be buried in the jungles, hidden away from their wives and children and
the light of the sun and their fellow men. They still would be dying
of fever, starvation, tortures."
He took her hand in both of his and held her finger-tips against his
lips.
"And they will never know," he whispered, "when their freedom comes,
that they owe it all to you."
On Hunter's Island, Jimmie Reeder and his bunkie, Sam Sturges, each on
his canvas cot, tossed and twisted. The heat, the moonlight, and the
mosquitoes would not let them even think of sleep.
"That was bully," said Jimmie, "what you did to-day about saving that
dog. If it hadn't been for you he'd ha' drownded."
"He would not!" said Sammy with punctilious regard for the truth; "it
wasn't deep enough."
"Well, the scout-master ought to know," argued Jimmie; "he said it was
the best 'one good turn' of the day!"
Modestly Sam shifted the lime-light so that it fell upon his bunkie.
"I'll bet," he declared loyally, "your 'one good turn' was a better
one!"
Jimmie yawned, and then laughed scornfully.
"Me!" he scoffed. "I didn't do nothing. I sent my sister to the
movies."
"SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE"
Marie Gessler, known as Marie Chaumontel, Jeanne d'Avrechy, the
Countess d'Aurillac, was German. Her father, who served through the
Franco-Prussian War, was a German spy. It was from her mother she
learned to speak French sufficiently well to satisfy even an
Academician and, among Parisians, to pass as one. Both her parents
were dead. Before they departed, knowing they could leave their
daughter nothing save their debts, they had had her trained as a nurse.
But when they were gone, Marie in the Berlin hospitals played politics,
intrigued, indiscriminately misused the appealing, violet eyes. There
was a scandal; several scandals. At the age of twenty-five she was
dismissed from the Municipal Hospital, and as now-save for the violet
eyes--she was without resources, as a compagnon de voyage with a German
doctor she travelled to Monte Carlo. There she abandoned the doctor
for Henri Ravignac, a captain in the French Aviation Corps, who, when
his leave ended, escorted her to Paris.
The duties of Captain Ravignac kept him in barracks near the aviation
field, but Marie he established in his apartments on the Boulevard
Haussmann. One day he brought from the barracks a roll of blue-prints,
and as he was locking them in a drawer, said: "The Germans would pay
through the nose for those!" The remark was indiscreet, but then Marie
had told him she was French, and any one would have believed her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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