“As it came nearer, he made out a little gray head in a blue foulard--or handkerchief--nodding above it.... O dear! there I’ve dropped two stitches in my heel.”
Olive drew breath, to pick them up.
“It--it was a refugee, not an animated basket; a little old Frenchwoman returning to her home--or what had been her home,” she went on, winking bright drops from her eyes. “And Clay--Clay, who before the War was never a ‘grind,’ must have asked permission to carry the basket for her, and got it, although one could only read between the lines in his letter, for he spoke of finding the ruin which had been her home, and of setting down all her household belongings with a jerk that made the bright saucepans rattle like chattering teeth when--when he saw that there were only four blackened walls standing, over which the Germans had set up a tin roof, with a horrid, winking old tin door.
“They had stabled horses there.
“Clay says he was just afraid to look at the thin, withered little face under the blue foulard.... But he heard a cluck and a stamp. There she was, the little old peasant-woman, tearing down the ugly sign which the enemy had set up, stamping on it with her wooden shoes, and muttering away to herself, so--so pluckily: ‘Tchu! Tchu! Tchu! C’a ne fait rien! C’est la guerre!’ And then she began singing aloud in a voice like a Victory siren:
“‘Mais ils ne l’aurout plus,
Jamais! Jamais!’
“‘But they’ll never have it again!
Never! Never!’”
Sara, pealing the translated echo, that seemed to come ringing across the ocean, sniffed now to her dory’s side, instinctively exchanging her blue-dripping brush, and its corresponding mood, for a dazzling white one, with which she painted in broad smears radiant dreams of Peace--restoration--reconstruction!