He sat, loaded down with all his campaign things, in the little yellow chair, and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at one another.
It is odd how one never can say any of the things to them; and how, always, they understand perfectly all the things one would say if one could.
He looked very ill, poor boy. Ten days' leave of convalescence after five months in the hospital has really not given him enough time to pick up. And he worries so. He can try to eat, but he cannot sleep at all. All night he thinks and thinks.
I know so very well just what he thinks.
He has never had many words with which to tell me, for he has had all his short life to work so hard that he could get little time for learning to express himself. But sometimes he says, "If I knew they were dead——"
They are his two little sisters. The mother died five years ago, the father several years before that. He helped his mother when he was still a schoolboy to take care of the little sisters, Célestine and Marie; and when the mother was dead he took care of them alone. Now he is twenty-four years old, and Célestine is seventeen and Marie sixteen.
Since the day he left, two years less just eleven days ago, he has had no word of them at all.
Others from those invaded countries have had perhaps messages, a postal card, some sort of a letter; but he had had no word.
An application we got through for him to the maire of the nearest large town has had only the answer that the farm exists no more and that nothing has been known of the two young girls.