“Oh, yes, we are going to Görsdorf, of course, but not to the castle. You remember our picnic there, when we had dinner in a vault? Some day Edmond will rebuild the house. We shall stay at the châlet for some time, and afterwards we go on to Metz. I think that I should like that. There is always something eerie about a place which you can’t get into and can’t get out of.”
“A description applying to a prison, I imagine.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“When one is in France one must think as France does. I am proud of Metz already; and, of course, a soldier’s wife should interest herself in the things that interest him.”
“Especially when the marching orders carry him to the Rue de la Paix.”
She laughed brightly.
“We are going to Paris in January,” she said. “It will be Mecca to me. Imagine it, five years in France, and only one week to try on hats at Aines. I tell Edmond that I am not civilised. He owes it to himself to start an establishment on the Boulevard St. Germain and a box at the opera. Either that or a finishing school somewhere near the Bois. We could spend our holidays together—when he comes home from the wars.”
A shadow crossed the man’s face. He looked down upon her for a moment and saw an exquisite vision of lace and flowers and satin, and dark eyes full of laughter, and cheeks flushed with excitement, and a little hand upon which a circle of diamonds glittered, and another ring of plain gold. Never in his life before had he understood why men could die for women; but he thought that he understood it in that instant.
“You have taken the wars into consideration, then?” he said.
She turned to him with a strange look of fear and wonder.