brother and the old
nurse?" he asked with much friendly interest in his kind eyes.

It was a very wonderful thing to observe the wee Pierre listen to the
narration of Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, concerning the actions
of a small boy who had run out of a night of shot and shell into the
heart of his regiment and who had now lived five months in the
trenches with them. Pierre's small face is all of France and in his
heart under his bent chest burns a soul all of France. It is as if in
her death, at his birth, my beautiful mother had stamped her race upon
him with the greater emphasis.

"Is it that the small Gaston is a daredevil like is my Bob?" he
questioned as we all made a laughter at the story of the Count de
Lasselles concerning the sortie of the small idol from the trenches in
the dead of one peaceful night to return with a very wide thick
flannel shirt of one of the _Boches_, which he had caught hanging
upon a temporary laundry line back of the German trenches.

At that English "daredevil" word I was in my mind again back in the
old Chateau de Grez and into my own childhood.

"You young daredevil, you, hold tight to that vine until I get a grip
on your wrist, or you'll dash us both on the rocks below," was the
exact sentence with which my father bestowed my title upon me as he
hung by his heels out of a window of the old vine-covered Chateau de
Grez.

"It is one large mistake that my _jeune fille_ is born what you
call a boy in heart. _Helas_!" sobbed my beautiful young French
mother as she regarded us from the garden below.

"If you were a boy I'd thrash you within an inch of your life, but as
you are a girl I suppose it is permissible for me to admire your
pluck, Mademoiselle Roberta," said my father as he landed me in the
music room by his side while an exchange of excited sentences went on
between my mother and old Nannette in the garden below. "What were you
doing out on that ledge, anyway? It is more than a hundred feet to the
ground and the rocks."

"I was making the hunt through Yellowstone Park that you have related
to me, father, and I prefer that you give me a boy's punishment. If I
have a boy's what you call 'pluck,' I should have a boy's what you
call 'thrashing.' Monsieur, I make that demand. I am the Marquise de
Grez and Bye, and it may be that as you are an American you do not
understand fully the honor of the house of Grez." I can remember that
as I spoke I drew my ten-year old bod