ly can't sit here and
talk to you while you stand. At least you will let me bring you a
chair?"

With a good deal of satisfaction Charlotta nodded her head, her hair
showing even duskier in contrast with the white bandage over her
forehead.

Talking to American girls she had found extraordinarily entertaining,
but to talk to a young American officer might be even more agreeable. It
certainly would be a novelty, as this youthful major was the first
American man with whom she had ever exchanged a word, save the two young
American Red Cross physicians.

"I want to congratulate you on your victory," Charlotta added, when the
chair had been secured and she had seated herself upon it in an entirely
friendly and informal attitude. "Always my sympathies have been with the
allies from the very first. You see my mother was French and I suppose I
am like her. I believe French people have the love of freedom in their
blood just as you Americans have."

"I say, I thought there was something unusual about you," Major Jimmie
answered impetuously. "I really can't imagine your being even half
German. But that is not very polite of me and anyhow your country is not
German. I have been reading about Luxemburg. You were once a part of
France and after the French revolution became one of the ten
departments, known as the department of forests, the Forest Canton.
Except for your Grand Ducal family you have never been German in
sentiment."

The Countess Charlotta hummed the line of a popular version of the
national anthem of Luxemburg at the present time.

"Prussians will we not become." Then as she could not help being
confidential she added:

"But suppose, suppose you were going to be forced into a German
marriage, what, what would you do? I hate it, hate it, and yet--"

"Well, nothing on earth would induce me to consider it," Major Jimmie
answered, his brown eyes shining and his face a deeper crimson. "You
must forgive me, but you know I can't see anything straight about
Germany yet and the thought of a girl like you marrying one of the
brutes,--but perhaps I ought not to say anything as we are strangers and
I might be tempted into saying too much."

"You could not say too much," Charlotta returned encouragingly. "I wish
you would give me your advice. If I had been a boy I would have run away
and fought against Germany and been killed, or if I had not been killed
perhaps my family would have cast me off. I am thinking of runnin