nd putting out the chairs. He sat sipping
coffee, feeling languid and nerveless. After a while Tom Randolph,
looking very young and brown with his hat a little on one side, came
along. With him, plainly dressed in blue serge, was the girl. They sat
down and she dropped her head on his shoulder, covering her eyes with
her dark lashes.

"Oh, I am so tired."

"Poor child! You must go home and go back to bed."

"But I've got to go to work."

"Poor thing." They kissed each other tenderly and languidly.

The waiter came with coffee and hot milk and little crisp loaves of
bread.

"Oh, Paris is wonderful in the early morning!" said Martin.

"Indeed it is.... Good-bye, little girl, if you must go. We'll see each
other again."

"You must call me Yvonne." She pouted a little.

"All right, Yvonne." He got to his feet and pressed her two hands.

"Well, what sort of a time did you have, Howe?"

"Curious. I lost our friends one by one, left two women and slept a
little while on the grass in front of Notre Dame. That was my real love
of the night."

"My girl was charming.... Honestly, I'd marry her in a minute." He
laughed a merry laugh.

"Let's take a cab somewhere."

They climbed into a victoria and told the driver to go to the Madeleine.

"Look, before I do anything else I must go to the hotel."

"Why?"

"Preventives."

"Of course; you'd better go at once."

The cab rattled merrily along the streets where the early sunshine cast
rusty patches on the grey houses and on the thronged fantastic
chimney-pots that rose in clusters and hedges from the mansard roofs.

CHAPTER VI

The lamp in the hut of the road control casts an oblong of light on the
white wall opposite. The patch of light is constantly crossed and
scalloped and obscured by shadows of rifles and helmets and packs of men
passing. Now and then the shadow of a single man, a nose and a chin
under a helmet, a head bent forward with the weight of the pack, or a
pack alone beside which slants a rifle, shows up huge and fantastic with
its loaf of bread and its pair of shoes and its pots and pans.

Then with a jingle of harness and clank of steel, train after train of
artillery comes up out of the darkness of the road, is thrown by the
lamp into vivid relief and is swallowed again by the blackness of the
village street, short bodies of seventy-fives sticking like ducks' tails
from between their large wheels; caisson after caisson of ammunition,
hu