“Why?”
“Because I told her I wouldn’t come back until I could bring her a German officer as a souvenir. Some idiot had told her he was going to, and, of course, I told her if she was collecting them I’d get her one. A fat chance I have too! I don’t know what made me do it. I’m only surprised I didn’t make it the Crown Prince while I was at it.”
But how soon were our thoughts to turn from soft thoughts of love to graver matters!
Tish, as I have said before, has a strange gift of foresight that amounts almost to prophecy.
I have never known her, for instance, to put a pink bow on an afghan and then have the subsequent development turn out to be a boy, or vice versa. And the very day before Mr. Ostermaier fell and sprained his ankle she had picked up a roller chair at an auction sale, and in twenty minutes he was in it.
At noon we stopped at a crossroads and distributed to some passing troops our usual cigarettes and chocolate. We also fried a number of doughnuts, and were given three cheers by various companies as they passed. It was when our labors were over that Tish perceived a broken machine gun abandoned by the roadside, and spent some time examining it.
“One never knows,” she said, “what bits of knowledge may one day be useful.”
Mr. Burton explained the mechanism to her.
“I’d be firing one of these things now,” he said gloomily, “if it were not for that devilish piece of American ingenuity, the shower bath.”
“Good gracious!” Aggie said.