t, Karl. I do not care for your
Death's Head and for the history of their amours."

She turned and gently laid her head on her father's knees. The young man
regarded her with a pallid sneer.

Addressing her back, still holding his boxful of pupae on his bony knees,
he said with the sneer quite audible in his voice:

"Your famous savant, Fabre, first inspired me to study the sex habits of
the Death's Head."

She made no reply, her cheek resting on her father's knees.

"It was because of his wonderful experiments with the Great Peacock moth
and with others of the genus that I have studied to acquaint myself
concerning the amours of the Death's Head. _And I have discovered that he
will find the female even if she be miles and miles away._"

The man was grinning now in the dusk--grinning like a skull; but the
girl's back was still turned and she merely found something in his voice
not quite agreeable.

"I think," she said in a low, quiet voice, "that I have now heard
sufficient about the Death's Head moth."

"Ah--have I offended mademoiselle? I ask a thousand pardons----"

Old Courtray awoke in the dusk.

"My quill, Maryette," he muttered, "--see if it floats yet?"

The girl bent over the water and strained her eyes. Her father tested the
line with shaky hands. There was no fish on the hook.

"_Voyons!_ The _asticot_ also is gone. Some robber fish has been
nibbling!" exclaimed the girl cheerfully, reeling in the line. "Father,
one cannot fish and doze at the same time."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of success--in peace as well as in war,"
said Karl, the student, as he aided Maryette to raise her father from the
chair.

"Vigilance," repeated the girl. "Yes, always now in France. Because always
the enemy is listening." ... Her strong young arm around her father, she
traversed the garden slowly toward the house. A pleasant odour came from
the kitchen of the White Doe, where an old peasant woman was cooking.

CHAPTER XXII

THE SUSPECT

That night she wrote to her lover at the great hospital in the south,
where he lay slowly growing well:

MY DJACK:

Today has been very beautiful, made so for me by my thoughts of
you and by a warm September sun which makes for human happiness,
too.

I am wearing my ribbon of the Legion. Ah, my Djack, it belongs
more rightly to you, who would not let me go alone to Nivelle that
dreadful day. Why do they not give you the cross?