In a very short time they caught the first glimpse of the searchlights on the French coast; and, soon afterwards, they drew into a dark harbor, amid vague cheerings and occasional bursts of the "Marseillaise" from wharves thronged with soldiers of a dozen nationalities. A British officer edged his way through the crowd below them on the quay, and waved his hand to Julian Sinclair. "Ah, there's our military guide, Captain Crump. Now, if you'll follow me and keep together, we'll get our passports examined quickly, and join him," said the latter, obviously relieved at the prospect of sharing his neutrals with a fellow-countryman. There followed a brief, but very exact, scrutiny and stamping of papers by an aquiline gentleman whose gold-rimmed spectacles suggested a microscopical carefulness; a series of abrupt introductions to Captain Crump on the gloomy wharf; a hasty bite and sup in a station restaurant, where blue uniforms mingled with khaki, and some red-tabbed British staff-officers, at the next table, were drinking wine with some turbaned Indian Princes. It was a strange glimpse of color and light rifting the darkness for a moment. Then they followed Captain Crump again, through great tarpaulined munition-dumps and loaded motor-lorries, to the two motor-cars behind the station. In these they were whirled, at forty miles an hour, along one of the poplar-bordered roads of France that seemed to-night as ghostly as those titanic alleys of Ulalume, in the song of May Margaret's national poet. Once or twice, as they passed through a cluster of cottages, the night-wind brought a whiff of iodoform, and reminded her that flesh and blood were fighting with pain and death somewhere in that darkness. Every few minutes they passed troops of dark marching men. Several times it seemed to her that she recognized the face for which she was looking, in some momentary glimmer of starlight. At last they reached the village where the guests of G. H. Q. were to be quartered. The foreigners were assigned to the château which was used as a guest-house; but there had been one or two unexpected arrivals, and Captain Crump asked the American correspondent if he would mind occupying a room in the house of the curé, a hundred yards away up the village street. The American correspondent was exceedingly glad to do so, and was soon engaged in attempts at conversation with the friendly old man in the black cassock who did his best to make her welcome. There were no more difficulties for her that night, except that the curé had very limited notions as to the amount of water she required for washing. They set out early the next morning on their way to that part of the front which she had particularly asked to see. The long straight poplar-bordered road, bright with friendly sunshine now, absorbed her. She heard the chatter of the correspondents at her side as in a dream.