"Now see!" he said earnestly. "No eye before has ever seen or will again. Will you guess, mademoiselle? Or you, Marie? René?"
"A tear?" ventured Sara Lee.
"But—do I look like weeping?"
He did not, indeed. He stood, tall and young and smiling before them, and produced from his pocket the walnut.
"Perceive!" he said, breaking it open and showing the kernel. "Has human eye ever before seen it?" He thrust it into Marie's open mouth. "And it is gone! Voilà tout!"
It was that evening, while Sara Lee cut bandages and Henri rolled them, that she asked him what his work was. He looked rather surprised, and rolled for a moment without replying. Then: "I am a man of all work," he said. "What you call odd jobs."
"Then you don't do any fighting?"
"In the trenches—no. But now and then I have a little skirmish."
A sort of fear had been formulating itself in Sara Lee's mind. The trenches she could understand or was beginning to understand. But this alternately joyous and silent idler, this soldier of no regiment and no detail—was he playing a man's part in the war?
"Why don't you go into the trenches?" she asked with her usual directness. "You say there are too few men. Yet—I can understand Monsieur Jean, because he has only one eye. But you!"