"'You are leaving us?' I asked.
"Yes, I am going to my own country to rest."
The afternoon had passed while we were talking. We rose to make our good-bys.
"Come with me," said the curé. He led us down the village street, to a small house, whose backyard is a little garden on the little river. All the setting was small and homelike and simple, like the village itself and the curé. A young woman stepped out from the kitchen to greet us.
"This is the girl," said Father Viller. Hélène Procès is twenty years old, with the dark coloring, soft, slightly olive skin, brown eyes, of a thousand other young women in the valley of the Meuse. But the look in her eyes was the same look that a friend of mine carries, though it is now twelve years since the hour when her mother was burned to death on board the General Slocum. Sudden horror has fixed itself on the face of this girl of Triacourt, whose mother and grandmother and aunt were shot in front of her in one moment.
She led us through the garden. There were only a few yards of it: just a little homely place. She brought us to the fence—a low wire affair, cheaply made, and easy to get over.
"The bullets were splashing around me," she said.
The tiny river, which had hardly outgrown its beginnings as a brook, went sliding past. It seemed a quiet place for a tragedy.