"This is the only time that I have not felt perfectly helpless," said Helen. "There is so little a woman can do when fighting is all that counts." "I was thinking of that myself," said Phil. "How helpless I am, though an able-bodied man!" "But you did knock a German down!" said Helen, with one of her mischievous glances. From the terrace they could now see the French everywhere, in the ravines and on the roads, sweeping across the fields in the wonderfully ordered system of a great army which had had generations of training. "It is good--good--good!" said Helen. They had recovered something which they had lost: the sense of freedom. The chateau and the grounds were once more their own; their minds and their souls were their own. Jacqueline's exaltation expressed itself in an amazingly good dinner; Helen's in a series of fresh cartoons over their coffee, which included "our hero" from the Southwest knocking down the German. A call from the curé brought word that trains would begin running to Paris on the morrow, which was a reminder to all that their period of isolation was over; and for Phil a strange and memorable holiday would be at an end. Helen went out with the curé and Phil and Henriette turned up the path. After they had watched the flashes of the guns in the distance for a while, they started walking slowly back and forth. "I don't know what we should have done if you had not been here," she said. "At least, I kept you in the cellar! Are you glad that you came?" he asked. "I would not have missed it for worlds!" answered Henriette. "And I owe it to you." "No, to Helen. But for her we should have been in Paris." "Yes, that's true," she replied thoughtfully. "And what would have become of her if we had not come?" "Gone on sketching until a shell hit her, I should say." "Or until she saw a wounded man and fainted! But there is something that I do owe to you and to you alone," Henriette went on softly. "I am appalled when I think of it--of the obligation. I--well----" now one of her trickling, enchanting laughs. "There's the portrait to repay you! I think that we might have a sitting in the morning." Here a white figure appeared around the corner of the path, and they were face to face with Helen. She drew back in the embarrassment of one conscious of more than a mere inadvertent intrusion. "I was going to look at the gun-fire for a minute," she said. It might have been Henriette's voice suddenly changing the subject. She had on the simple gown whose cut was the same as Henriette's, who had dressed for dinner that evening with her usual care. Something in Helen's distraitness, a sense of her loneliness, aroused an impulse in Phil. "Make it three!" said he. He went to her, took her hand and drew her arm into his. She seemed to resist slightly and then to yield almost tremblingly. Henriette also slipped her arm into his.