It was washing day, and Josephine and madame were hanging out the linen in the orchard. A pair of Papa Lorellard’s blue linen trousers flaunted it in the sunlight between the two white sheets; and a red petticoat completed the tricolour. From the schoolhouse across the lane came a murmur of children’s voices. Old Lorellard’s geese gaggled in the meadow.

“The colonel is in love with Claire,” said Josephine to her mother.

Madame Lorellard was pegging up a pair of lace-edged pillow slips.

“It is understandable,” quoth the old lady; “I have seen it for days.”

“It is a pity,” said the daughter.

“Why a pity? I do not think that any harm will come of it.”

Josephine grimaced.

“No; they are both too strong, and monsieur is not like other officers. But it is a pity.”

“Well?”

“That he is married. He would have married Claire.”

“Ma chérie, what a romancer you are!”

“I am not, Maman. And Claire wants him.”

Madame Lorellard’s kind blue eyes grew sharp and questioning.

“Has she told you?”

“Would Claire tell me, or anybody? But she wants him as she has never wanted a man, and he—he is hers—body and soul. They are in heaven, and in hell, Maman.”

“How do you know?”

“I have sharp eyes and a heart. My dear Maman, I am a woman, a vain one, a talkative one, but I love Claire. I am handsome, yes, and I have black eyes, and a mouth that troubles most men, but this man is different; he has fallen down at little Claire’s feet. He could not help it, I think. These things just happen.”

Madame Lorellard went on hanging up her linen. Her ruddy face looked impressive, untroubled, the face of an old woman who was not easily shaken. Her blue eyes were proud.

“Yes, it is a pity,” she said, “and yet I clap him on the shoulder for it. A man of sense, a good man, so merry, and so courteous. He will not do her any harm.”

“But she will suffer,” said Josephine; “Claire is not like the vain, light-hearted ones.”

“But it is a triumph,” said the old Frenchwoman; “such a man and an English colonel, a good soldier. Let her look at it in that way.”

“Claire cares nothing for triumphs. She wants the man—the one man, and his children.”

“Bless the girl,” said Madame Lorellard, “but if he had married her we might have lost her. Is not that something?”

“You are growing old, Maman,” said her daughter.

Even the children at the school were aware of a change in Mademoiselle Claire Vignard, or “la petite mère,” as they called her. She looked sad, so sad at times; the class noticed it when it should have been absorbed in its sums. There were moments when “la petite mère” was strangely inattentive, and she could be caught gazing out of the window at the white road and the beech trees and the great clouds and the blue sky. She was like a child whose heart was not in her lessons, and who wanted to be away somewhere; the class understood that quite well, but the reason of it was beyond the understanding of the class. Claire had always been so vital, so smiling, so shrewd, so calm, so full of interest in her teaching, a little mother who had persuaded the lazy ones to take trouble. Half the small boys were in love with her. She was so much prettier, so much more charming than Mademoiselles Epinard and Fleury, those two rather thin women who were so ready to scold.

And then came that morning when Mademoiselle Claire Vignard worked out a sum incorrectly on the blackboard, and did not notice it. But Monsieur Moreau, the schoolmaster, who happened to come into the room, noticed it and was shocked.

Such a thing had never happened before in Claire’s career.

“Mademoiselle Vignard! It is incorrect!”

“Which, monsieur?”

“The example on the blackboard.”

The class maintained a grave silence. Claire, faintly flushed, had left her chair and was looking at the chalked figures on the board. Then she took a duster and a stick of chalk and made the proper corrections.

“I am sorry, monsieur.”

M. Moreau happened to be worried, and in a bad temper.

“Please be more careful in future.”

The class was indignant, scandalised. For any man to speak to “la petite mère” in such a fashion! Little Emile, the chanticleer of the class, protruded a contemptuous tongue behind M. Moreau’s back.

“Cochon!” muttered the infant.

Claire smiled at them all when the schoolmaster had marched out. She had recovered herself.

“Did none of you see that I was saying my prayers on the blackboard?” she asked them.

Emile stood up and replied with great solemnity. He was destined to be an orator.

“The class would never confess that Mademoiselle Vignard could make a mistake,” he said; “the error was in M. Moreau’s manners.”

Claire’s laughing eyes thanked this sententious little diplomat of seven.

“Perhaps I shall never make a mistake again, Emile. If I do, the class shall correct me.”

Tod, too, had touched a season of great sadness. The gods were warning him that this happy sojourn in Myonville was drawing to a close, for were not reinforcements arriving, and a temporarily depressed brigadier showing a new sparkle and a more critical alertness. Some day their marching orders would arrive with all the blind suddenness of a bolt from Olympus. And Tod’s heart was in Myonville. He could not help it; it had just happened so. This green and golden month had been a season of strange beauty and tenderness, the happiest and yet the saddest month in all Tod’s life.

He would never see Claire again. He had no right to see her again, and he knew that he loved as he had never thought to love any woman, as his father must have loved his mother. It was all so hopeless and so tragic, and yet there was no bitterness in Tod’s heart; the romance was too great for that. He was just a big man, profoundly touched, profoundly sad, not a little afraid of hurting the heart of the woman he loved, still more sad when he thought of that other woman.

Tod was tempted, but the Quixote in him kept its face in the sunlight.

“If you took the trouble to find out,” said the voice, “you might discover things that would set you free.”

And Tod refused.

“It can’t be done,” he answered. “I can’t play the spy and the cad to win her.”

But he wanted to pour out his heart to Claire, to express that love of his with all the passion and the tenderness that cried out in him like the joy of the spring. There was such an exultation in loving her as he did, and yet it was the thought of the afterwards that made him pause and remain silent. Tod knew that he would suffer most terribly when he left her, but he would have a man’s work to do, other men to think of, while Claire—would just have this little village and her children. She had been contented before his coming, and Tod spent those last days in wondering whether she cared, whether she cared as he did. He did not want to suffer; his vanity was not concerned in it, and yet—— What a memory to carry in his heart, what a splendid tenderness for a man to die with after all the little meannesses of his marriage!

It was Tod’s last evening but one in Myonville, though he did not know it then, and he walked over the fields to Gibas where another battalion was quartered, and had tea with the officers who were billeted in the château. The colonel was a ragged old ruffian of a Scot, lean, biting, merciless, but with a heart of gold. He had a peculiar affection for Tod; in a sense they were rivals. Both battalions swore by their colonels.

“You will be staying to dinner, Western?”

And Tod refused.

“Sorry, Colonel, but I must get back.”

“Must—must! There’s no must about it! Just a wee French lassie somewhere, my lad!”

Tod blushed.

“I’m nearly twenty years younger than you are, sir.”

“Ye soft-tongued young scamp, calling me sir! Well, get along with you.”

And Tod went, old Melville walking as far as the red-brick gate-house with him, eager as some rough-haired terrier over the news that was coming in.

“We’ll be at them again in ten days, my lad. They say we shall move north to St. Omer to pick up some more men and spend a week knocking them into shape.”

“I’m ready,” said Tod with a far-away smile as the old Scot turned back at the gate, “though I had almost forgotten the war back here.”

“Yes, it has been a brave month, Western. I’m the better for a sight of the children and those big trees.”

Tod walked back through the deep lanes of Gibas, with the elms and the beeches meeting above his head and a small stream that had grown tired of its proper bed winding as it pleased about the sandy road. The blue sky was almost invisible, so thick was the canopy of leaves, and the little white houses seemed lost and hidden in this world of green growth. The road climbed slowly out of these woodland deeps like a snake crawling out to bask in the sun. Tod had a sweep of fields before him, sheeted with red sainfoin and wheat full of scarlet poppies. The distant trees of Myonville cut the deep blue arch of the sky like the misty towers of a distant town. A great iron crucifix stood on a mound just where the road left the shadows of the trees.

Tod took a field-track that branched away to the left. It was a favourite walk of his, a sort of pilgrim’s way that was in no hurry to get to any particular place, turning aside and loitering when a tree or a piece of orchard or a row of old trees pleased it. At times it cut deep into the fields like the sunk bed of a stream. Tod knew that it would bring him into Myonville close to old Lorellard’s poplar wood, where he could turn into the meadows and so through the orchard to the Lorellards’ house. He felt that he wanted to be alone and to escape the salutes of his men.

Half-way across the fields the track skirted a little grove of aspens, and sitting on the grass bank under one of these trees Tod saw Claire Vignard. She was all alone there like some Joan of Arc under the trees of Domrémy, and so absorbed in her own thoughts that she did not see Tod or hear his footsteps, so that he came on her like a figure that steps down out of a dream.

Tod had faltered for a moment, swept by a rush of great tenderness. She looked so much alone with her dear self, a little lost, so unconsciously sad that his heart misgave him. He wanted to go to her, reach out his hands and meet the soft light of her grey eyes and utter those words that haunted him day and night:

“Ma chérie, I love you.”

Yet when he saw her sitting there alone, gazing towards the far horizon of her dreams, his own tenderness smote him in the mouth. There was nothing that he might say to her, nothing that he had the right to say.

He moved on again, and suddenly she saw him, the very man of her thoughts, the mate of her dear desires, but she remained still, still as a bird whose startled heart beats rapidly. Deep in her eyes shone a soft inward glow. She felt Tod loved her, and would never speak.

“No school to-day?”

“It is a holiday, monsieur.”

Tod stood looking down at her, the little woman with the sunlight on her face and hair, her bosom moving with a suggestion of slight breathlessness under the plain white blouse, her grey eyes shining—yet faintly clouded, each hand clasping a tuft of grass. Tod trembled on the edge of that tragic tenderness of his. He wanted her, and she, in her dreams, had felt herself embraced by him.

“It is so beautiful and peaceful here,” he said.

“Not a leaf moves,” she answered, looking upwards.

“Still as an empty church.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and dreamed. Tod was so near, yet she knew that he would come no nearer.

“You have been very happy in Myonville?” she asked him suddenly.

“Very happy.”

And then he added:

“I know that I shall never be so happy again.”

Those were the only words he could utter, but in the stillness of the fields she took them into her heart.

“I am going back now, monsieur,” she said.

“May I walk with you?”

“If you wish it.”

And silence walked with them nearly all the way.