"But why should I go?" Sara Lee asked. "It is kind of you to ask me,
Jean. But I am here to work, not to play."

Long ago Sara Lee had abandoned her idea of Jean as a paid chauffeur.
She even surmised, from something Marie had said, that he had been a
person of importance in the Belgium of before the war. So she was
grateful, but inclined to be obstinate.

"You have been so much alone, mademoiselle--"

"Alone!"

"Cut off from your own kind. And now and then one finds, at the hotel
in Dunkirk, some English nurses who are having a holiday. You would
like to talk to them perhaps."

"Jean," she said unexpectedly, "why don't you tell me the truth? You
want me to leave the village to-night. Why?"

"Because, mademoiselle, there will be a bombardment."

"The village itself?"

"We expect it," he answered dryly.

Sara Lee went a little pale.

"But then I shall be needed, as I was before."

"No troops will pass through the town to-night. They will take a road
beyond the fields."

"How do you know these things?" she asked, wondering. "About the troops
I can understand. But the bombardment."

"There are ways of finding out, mademoiselle," he replied in his
noncommittal voice. "Now, will you go?"