Happy smiled, and, since they were, after all, neighbours, talked with him for the rest of the journey. Though it had been a long while since her heart had admitted a flutter at the glances or speeches of a man, the young woman found herself awakening to the discovery that she was still young. He asked if he might come to see her, and often after that his horse stood hitched at the settlement school. When one night a few months later he smiled his grave smile and said, "I've come to bid you farewell; I'm going away tomorrow," she acknowledged a sudden sharpness of pang. "Where?" she demanded. And he answered: "Over there." They were standing on the squared log that made a foot bridge between the thicketed banks of Little Laurel, and through a heavy mass of clouds the moon was just emerging into a narrow field of pearl and opal. Because it was rising and still hung low, its face was not pallid but rosy, and the top plumes of a single hemlock-clump showed outlined, and swaying. Elsewhere the sky was still cloud-dark. "I haven't known you long," Joe Gregory was saying, "and I've always been a mighty plain, uninteresting sort of man, but if I come back, there'll be things I've got to say to you." He paused, and there was a touch of eager hope in his voice as he finished. "The war'll change lots of things. Maybe it'll change me some, too." "Don't let it change you too much, Joe," the girl cautioned him, and he bent forward to assure himself that the light which he thought he saw in her eyes was real. CHAPTER XLVIII Paris by night was a dancer who has taken the veil. Paris by day, when the siren screamed its air-raid warning, was a bold spirit not cowed but sobered with a realization of death. Yet today Paris was vibrantly alive along her boulevards where, despite the shadow, bright currents flowed and sparkled. For was not this the Fourth of July, the national day of the sister republic across the sea? And this afternoon would not the avenues echo to the tramp of the first marching feet, as columns in khaki swung along under the flag of the new ally? Paris had bled as she waited; France had given life and treasure and made no lament, but now the vanguard of mighty reinforcements had arrived, and this afternoon, in the welcome poured out upon them, Paris would voice her quickened spirit of confidence restored and doubt dispelled. Along sidewalks, where once the world had come to behold the gaiety and taste the enchantment, trooped civilian crowds, linking elbows with the uniformed sleeves of France, of Italy, of Britain, of Belgium and of Portugal. Everywhere flashed and rang the cheer of a great day, and everywhere showed the sobering of black with the tunics of horizon blue. With the fluttering flags went the white of bandages, and with tramp of feet mingled the stumping of the _blesse's_ crutch.