just that comfort in it that she could tell that she was interpreting this strange new world rightly. Had she but known, she possessed two of the greatest advantages over most of the women in those surroundings--radiant health, that brightened her glance, polished her skin, burnished her hair--and, in spite of her quiet clothes and steady eyes, an air of independence of which she was probably unconscious, but which was far more attractive than the air of facile complicity with male patronage that many girls wore. Like all advantages, these carried with them their own inconvenience, as she soon discovered. * * * * * Among Aunt Blanquart’s lodgers were men, too weedy or too well protected to have been mobilized. They functioned on the railway, or some other public service, she did not care what, with colored brassards on their arms. She had paid no heed to them, secure in the fatal confidence of a strong nature, merely getting out of them anything they knew about the movements of troops, feigning the fatuous gossiping curiosity that was common enough. She was so immersed in her Fixed Idea that she was astonished when the more pimply of them slipped past Aunt Blanquart’s semi-official vigilance, as she was going home to her room, and following her, proposed, “Suppose we take a little walk, as the English say!” Madeleine turned on him a freezing stare: “What for?” she demanded, standing her ground. The pimply-faced one faded back into the house, muttering excuses, only to confide in his friends later that Madeleine was a “rosse,” “an awkward beast,” as one should say. Then again, when the skull-capped old gentleman who controlled her room went sick, the worried head of the department came across to Madeleine naturally with: “Give out the work to the room, while this old Do-nothing is away, will you?” She did the distribution of the endless schedules, minutes and circulars deftly enough, and corrected the errors with a firm hand. It took far less thought than most of her days at the farm. When the “old Do-nothing” returned, skull-capped, pallid, smelling of lozenges, she met him with, “I have done” so and so, and “you will find this” there and that “under the paper weight!” etc., going quietly back to her desk. At night he lingered, and was left alone with her, because she was never in such a hurry as the others to crowd downstairs, squabble in the lobby over the inadequate space allowed for dressing oneself for the walk home. She turned and stared as he asked her to dine with him.