“Is there anything I can do, Sally? Oh, I might as well speak plainly, I don’t know how to speak in any other way. My sister Peggy told me that you had nursed that French lieutenant, Lieutenant Fleury through an illness of some kind months ago and that a few of the girls believe you care more for him than you would like people to know. That is why I wish you please to go on back home, Sally. You are too young and you are an American girl and he is a Frenchman, and oh, I should hate it, Sally! Forgive me, you know I want to do what your brother would do under the same circumstances, we have known each other so long and you have no brother of your own.”
Sally stopped gazing at the scenery at this moment and turned her golden brown eyes to stare into Dan’s blue ones.
There was a mischievous gleam in their centers and yet oddly there was also a suggestion of tears.
“But I have had another offer of a brother, Dan, oh, not so very long ago! Lieutenant Fleury also suggested that he would like to be a brother to me. I don’t like being ungrateful, but I declined. Really so long as fate sent me no real brother I don’t think I care for an adopted one.
“Just the same, Dan dear, don’t feel I do not appreciate what you have just said. It is true I have never been happy since our retreat to Paris. I am not in love with Lieutenant Fleury, no one need worry over that possibility, but something did happen on the way here which might not have affected any one else seriously, but which I have never been able to forget. You cannot forget the sights and sounds of a great battle, neither can I forget what I saw and heard on our retreat to Paris.
“I saw poor old women and children dying from cold and hunger and babies as well. I saw them being driven a second time penniless and broken from their little homes. Yet it was not these things altogether, Dan, it was something else.”
Along the seat Sally slid her small hand until it was held comfortingly in Dan’s large one.
“I think I would like to tell you, Dan, perhaps it would be easier to speak to you than anyone else and afterwards I shall feel happier.
“One night on our way to Paris from our farmhouse, Aunt Patricia and Vera Lagerloff and I discovered a young girl, not perhaps as old as I am, sitting alone by the side of the road.
“When Aunt Patricia spoke to her, she did not answer, or even look at us. Then Aunt Patricia got down from her wagon and spoke to the girl and asked if she could help her. She found that the girl could not speak and so we took her into the wagon with us.”