The girl shook her head.
"You are very kind and you can be quite certain I am not afraid of you. Sit down again, I know you will refuse to confess it, but you do look pretty weak still. And there is nothing the matter with me. Oh, I have a few bruises and a broken arm, but after all they are not serious. I wonder now what I was actually trying to do when I flung myself off my horse. Have you ever been desperate enough not to care what happened to you?"
"But you don't mean, Countess Charlotta—"
"How do you know my name?" the girl answered quickly, as if wishing to forget what she had just confessed. "Are you not Major James Hersey, one of the youngest majors in the United States overseas service? I think I have been hearing a good deal of you from Bianca Zoli and the other Red Cross girls."
Major Jimmie Hersey colored through his pallor, according to his annoying boyish habit.
"Well, Countess Charlotta, surely you have not counted on remaining a mystery—not to the American soldiers who have been ill here in your house, your guests in a fashion. We have seldom had so romantic an experience as having a countess as a patient along with the American doughboys and in the selfsame hospital. But I really can't sit here and talk to you while you stand. At least you will let me bring you a chair?"
With a good deal of satisfaction Charlotta nodded her head, her hair showing even duskier in contrast with the white bandage over her forehead.
Talking to American girls she had found extraordinarily entertaining, but to talk to a young American officer might be even more agreeable. It certainly would be a novelty, as this youthful major was the first American man with whom she had ever exchanged a word, save the two young American Red Cross physicians.
"I want to congratulate you on your victory," Charlotta added, when the chair had been secured and she had seated herself upon it in an entirely friendly and informal attitude. "Always my sympathies have been with the allies from the very first. You see my mother was French and I suppose I am like her. I believe French people have the love of freedom in their blood just as you Americans have."
"I say, I thought there was something unusual about you," Major Jimmie answered impetuously. "I really can't imagine your being even half German. But that is not very polite of me and anyhow your country is not German. I have been reading about Luxemburg. You were once a part of France and after the French revolution became one of the ten departments, known as the department of forests, the Forest Canton. Except for your Grand Ducal family you have never been German in sentiment."