Part First Chapter 2 The Government Interferes

"There is a short cut across that meadow," said the young girl,
raising a rounded, sun-tinted arm, bare to the shoulder.

"You are very kind," said I, looking at her steadily.

"And, after that, you will come to a thicket of white birches."

"Thank you, mademoiselle."

"And after that," she said, idly following with her blue eyes the
contour of her own lovely arm, "you must turn to the left, and there
you will cross a hill. You can see it from where we stand--"

She glanced at me over her outstretched arm. "You are not listening,"
she said.

I shifted a troubled gaze to the meadow which stretched out all
glittering with moist grasses and tufts of rain-drenched wild
flowers.

The girl's arm slowly fell to her side, she looked up at me again, I
felt her eyes on me for a moment, then she turned her head toward the
meadow.

A deadened report shook the summer air--the sound of a cannon fired
very far away, perhaps on the citadel of Strasbourg. It was so
distant, so indistinct, that here in this peaceful country it lingered
only as a vibration; the humming of the clover bees was louder.

Without turning my head I said: "It is difficult to believe that
there is war anywhere in the world--is it not, mademoiselle?"

"Not if one knows the world," she said, indifferently.

"Do you know it, my child?"

"Sufficiently," she said.

She had opened again the book which she had been reading when I first
noticed her.