“Then I can go! You think I may, Lucy? Oh, how I should love it! To forget the war, to go far away from it!” Suddenly her face clouded and, as quickly as it had brightened, became serious, calm and thoughtful as every day. “But I must not think about it until I know that it is true. Perhaps I must not take the money.”
“Think about it all you like,” said Lucy, slipping her arm through Michelle’s with quick sympathy. “I tell you, you’re going.”
Armand was as anxious that his sister should have the change for which she silently longed, and, to Lucy’s delight, he let no obstacle stand in the way. Larry had left for England a few days after Franz’ and Herr Johann’s arrest, and his letters to Bob and Lucy were filled with inducements to his friends to hasten their trip to England.
“It’s not a bit cold here now,” he wrote early in April. “It’s simply perfect. Warm enough for Bob, even. Don’t you know what some fellow wrote about 'Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there’? Do hurry.”
Mrs. Gordon arrived in Coblenz the third week in April. Ten days later, Bob, Lucy and Michelle, together with one of Mrs. Gordon’s fellow-workers, sailed from Calais on a fine spring morning.
Michelle had a hard struggle with her feelings at the moment of parting. She had no fear for her mother in Armand’s care, but the thought of leaving France, with promise of peace behind her and of pleasure ahead, seemed so much happiness that it was more like grief in its intensity. Somehow she felt, as the boat left the French coast and steamed over the sunlit ocean, that never until that moment had she realized that the war’s dreadful ordeal was endured and ended, and that a new life—all her life—lay ahead.
She did not need to explain this to Lucy, who understood her silence well enough, filled with thoughts of her own not in reality so very different. With France and Germany left behind, she seemed also to have cast off a part of her—a thoughtful, prudent, anxious part—painfully acquired since 1917, and to become again light-hearted.
Yet after half an hour’s silent reflection she found no other way to express herself, as she turned to Bob with a deep light in her hazel eyes, than to say, “Bob—the war is over!”
Bob looked at her, smiling, something happy about his face, too, as he answered idly, “Really? Full of news, aren’t you?”
“Oh, Bob, don’t laugh,” Lucy said, watching the shining sea, and the white clouds softly piled above the horizon. “I don’t think Michelle or I ever really believed it until now.”