Sylvia returned to the pension to announce her success.
"Well, if you get ill," said Mère Gontran, "mind you come back here at once. You're not a good medium; in fact, I believe you're a deterrent; but I like to see you about the place, and of course I do like to talk English, but there again, when shall I ever see England?"
When Sylvia had heard Mère Gontran speak of her native country formerly, it had always been as the place where an unhappy childhood had been spent, and she had seemed to glory in her expatriation. Mère Gontran answered her unspoken astonishment:
"I think it's the war," she explained. "It's seeing so much about England in the newspapers; I've got a feeling I'd like to go back, and I will go back after the war," she proclaimed. "Some kind of nationality my three sons shall have, if it's only their mother's. Which reminds me. Poor Carrier has been killed."
"Killed," Sylvia repeated. "Already?"
In the clutch of apprehension she realized that other and dearer friends than he might already be dead.
"I thought we could celebrate your last night by trying to get into communication with him," said Mère Gontran.
It was as if she had replied to Sylvia's unvoiced fear.
"No, no," she cried. "If they are dead, I don't want to know."
So Carrier with all his mascots had fallen at last, and he would never cultivate that little farm in the Lyonnais; she remembered how he had boasted of the view across the valley of the Saône to the long line of the Alps: far wider now was his view, and his room at the pension was the abode of owls. She read the paragraph in the French paper: he had been killed early in September very gloriously. If Paradise might be the eternal present of a well-beloved dream, he would have found his farm; if human wishes were not vanity, he was at peace.