Although so short a time had elapsed, the Madeleine who traveled from Amiens to Paris was a very different girl from the Madeleine who had left Hondebecq three months earlier. The very manner of her shaking off “Papa” showed it: The habit of the village in which she had grown up, regarding railways, consisted in going to the station, hearing when the next train went to the required destination, and waiting for it. To possess and understand a time-table--more, to have mastered the complicated regulations of a military station in war-time, was the measure of how far Madeleine had advanced. She found herself in a Paris that had an air of forced cheerfulness and dumb expectancy. True, the panic of the day of mobilization, growing right up to the Aisne battle, was over; the alarums of 1918 were not yet in sight. But it was a Paris bereft of men, many a shutter closed; a Paris as yet unhaunted by Americans, but beginning to be desperate in its pleasures. What its best historians, its great lovers, Murger or Victor Hugo, would have thought of it, cannot be conjectured. Its fabled gaiety was gone for good. Its heroism had that poisoned quality that makes women cover broken hearts with cheap finery. Madeleine, who had never imagined a town of the size before, spent the first two months quietly taking it all in. She had the sense to see that she must start all over again. She did her work with zest--it suited her. That suited her Controller, who put her to lodge with relatives--retired people of official class, who lived in an “apartment,” a tiny flat in a huge block of buildings situated just where the scholarly Pantheon district trails off into the poverty of St. Étienne du Mont. No one could be more self-effacing than Madeleine when she wished to. During her first weeks in Paris she attended to her work, lived quietly with Monsieur and Madame Petit, dressed soberly, glanced at no one in the street, or in the great office where her duties lay. She made herself amiable and useful in the small precise household, left it in time to catch her ’bus, that landed her opposite the bridge, across which towered the world-famous gallery in which the Ministry to which she was attached was housed. She made herself agreeable to the girls with whom she worked. Some were country girls, shy or inefficient, but there was not a Fleming amongst them, and she concealed her opinion that she knew better than they about most things. As for the native Parisiennes, of whom all sorts and conditions were gathered into that great harbor of steady work and sure pay, she admired their ferocious femininity and put up with their moods--even when they called her “Boche du Nord”--the equivalent of calling a Worcestershire girl a Welshwoman--which they did at times, out of sheer dislike of her demure capacity. To have seen her, no one would have suspected that she was gleaning every scrap of information she could with regard to the Flying