"Letters of that kind are dropping all over France," said Helen, when she described the incident to her mother. "Don't!" said Madame Ribot. "Don't let us dwell upon it!" So it was not mentioned at dinner. Yet though the food was equally good, Madame Ribot equally genial and Henriette equally sparkling, none could help thinking of Madame Pigou; and the fact of that column on the way to the front brought a suggestion of possibilities. "Remember that you are to remain as long as you please," said Madame Ribot to Phil as she bade him good-night. "I feel some way that--well, you give us a sense of security." CHAPTER X THE VOICE AT HIS ELBOW Why no more news of the brilliant advance into Alsace? What meant the official silence about Mulhausen and Liége? At Mervaux they read the papers no less helplessly than elsewhere. The three cousins assisted Madame Pigou in finishing her harvest. No more soldiers passed along the road; Henriette went on with her painting, and Helen was absent on other missions. Phil was drifting and he found drifting pleasant, though it was carrying him onto the rocks. "I ought to go or I'll be hit for good!" he thought, in moments of sanity. Seventeenth cousinship was all very well, but he had better face the facts. He was a young man who had to earn his own living three thousand miles away; and here was a young woman in a chateau forty miles from Paris who had been bred in French ways. He saw only Henriette; he lived Henriette; and Madame Ribot who watched him realised better than he how serious was his case. But how could he go with the portrait unfinished? How could he go when he did not want to go; when he was perfectly willing to allow Henriette to go on for months painting his portrait? Sometimes Helen broke her rule of leaving the two to themselves, to come and stand for a while and watch her sister at work. Phil grew rather to resent her presence on such occasions, for she was usually silent and Henriette became silent, too, as if under restraint. A fear that he had shown signs of regarding Helen as an intruder led him to remind her one morning at breakfast that she had not yet kept her promise to make a charcoal portrait as a companion to Henriette's painting to take back to Longfield. He realised that the suggestion was consummate egoism as soon as he had made it; the more so as she received it with a naïve, baffling surprise. "You have forgotten it!" he said. "Almost," she replied thoughtfully. "You are very polite." For an instant she regarded him with fixed inquiry; then out of the depths of her eyes he saw the mischief bubbling forth as it had when she held the mirror up to him across the table at Truckleford. In that mood he knew that he must expect any unconventional sally.