Mr. Price beckoned to the group of Huns.
They rose. Two of them, the sailor and the dark soldier whom Muriel had pronounced "quite good-looking for a Boche," made as if to come nearer.
"Now, Mr. Price! Let me give them their rations!" Muriel begged prettily. She put aside her sunshade, took the bag of provisions from the farmer's hand, and stepped forward.
The eyes of all four Germans were fastened eagerly upon her; she was without a doubt the most alluring sight that had met their gaze since last it had fallen on a good, pre-war, "echt-Deutsch" meal of veal and sour cabbage with damson sauce.
In fact, they looked at her rather as if she were something to eat, this dainty English girl, "fresh as milk and blood," as their own idiom has it, with her summery hat shading her big eyes, and her frock one of the usual bouquets of delaine she wore, in colour white and yellow this time, and of a cut that gave generous glimpses of the yellow gossamer silk stockings above her suede shoes.
It was exactly the kind of look with which the Prussian officers had been wont to ogle the school-procession of us as we walked down Unter den Linden in the old days on our way to classes.
I had heard that Germans have only two ways of looking at a woman....
I felt I didn't like them to look at an English girl like that!
Muriel seemed to have no such thought as these Germans took their food from her hand and drew nearer to her, smiling into her face and answering the greeting she gave to them in their own tongue.
"You like working here on the land?" she asked them in the careful German that we had acquired in our Berliner pension.