Pimpernel and Rosemary

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
This was in July 1916.
The woman sat alone in the room downstairs, stitching, stitching, by the flickering light of a small oil-lamp that stood on a ricketty deal table close beside her. By the side of the lamp there were some half-dozen khaki tunics, and the woman took up these tunics one by one, looked them over and patted them and turned them about and about: then she took up the scissors and undid a portion of the lining. After which she stitched that portion of the lining up again, but not before she had inserted something—something that was small and white and crisp and that she took out from a fold in the bosom of her dress—between the lining and the cloth.
And this she did to each of the half dozen tunics in turn.
The room was small and bare, the paper hung down from the walls in strips, but it happened to have a ceiling that had only partially fallen in during the last bombardment, and so it might be termed a luxurious room, seeing that there were very few ceilings left in Guillaumet now. There was no roof to the house, and not a pane of glass anywhere, but as it was very hot this July, this was really an advantage. Quite a pleasant draught stirred the tattered curtain that masked the broken window and fanned the woman's dark, unruly hair about her damp forehead.
She sat in ragged bodice and petticoat, her sleeves tucked up above her elbows, her bodice open, showing throat and breasts that were not unshapely.
You are kind to those English fellows, Alice, a dry, sarcastic voice said suddenly, close behind her.
The woman gave a start, and the hand that patted and folded the last of the tunics shook ever so slightly. Her pale, wan face looked almost ashen in hue in the dim light of the lamp. She turned and looked at the newcomer, a tall, lean fellow with touzled dark hair and unshaven chin, who lolled under the lintel of the door, chewing the stump of a cigar and gazing at her with a kind of indulgently sarcastic expression in his deep-set eyes. At sight of him she seemed reassured. It was only Lucien—Lucien the vagrant, the picker-up of unconsidered trifles, attached as porter to one of the American hospitals somewhere close by. So everybody round about here understood. But no one ever inquired further than that; everyone was too busy to trouble about other people's affairs; and Lucien was useful and willing. Though he had a game leg he would do anything he was asked—run errands, repair a derelict car, clean boots, anything. Lucien l'Américain they called him. The Yank the English flying boys from the aerodrome at Guillaumet had nicknamed him.