Madeleine went to Amiens, but it hardly describes what happened to say that she went by herself without other companions than chance fellow-travelers, for, in her, there entered the capital of Northern France more than a single Flemish girl. She took up with her, all about her, an atmosphere of the frontier, of staunch Flanders, of the Spanish Farm. Countrified she might be, certainly a stranger, but there was nothing callow or helpless about her. She showed that maturity that connoisseurs of wine mean when they speak of “body.” Generations, a whole race, living in one way, confronted century after century with much the same environments, had prepared that quality in her, which led no one to wonder at or pity her. Had there been any Society for the Protection of Young Girls at the station at Amiens, it would not have considered her a “case,” as she swung down on to the platform, produced her ticket and papers, and bargained with an old man with a barrow to take her box--a bargain she struck much to her advantage by shouldering the said box and starting to carry it herself. The Amiens to which Madeleine went was the Amiens of mid-war--that is to say, a general manufacturing town of eighty thousand people, provincial, antiquated as such towns can be only in France--which town, plunged into European war, had seen the Germans march through its streets. It was now reserve railhead, camping-ground, last-civilized-spot for the avalanches of reinforcements the English were pouring into the line. Most of the French who fought beside them in that northern sector had to pass through it. Madeleine had not been able to calculate with any nicety how her move had increased her chances of meeting Georges, but she got as far as beginning to understand what the Baron had meant by the “English effort,” the immensity of that Volunteer Army, the constant watching and waiting that would be necessary to find Georges among the hundreds of French Mission officers that went with it. But like all vague steps, the one that she had taken was comforting because of its novelty, its unplumbed depths of possibility. Once cut adrift from home, and having suppressed a tiny shyness, rising in the throat, she flung herself into the new life with gusto. She was not wholly ignorant of towns, had been to Hazebrouck and St. Omer, to Dunkirk even, once, and was ready as any country-grown girl to fall under the spell of town life and strive desperately to look as if she had always lived it. * * * * *