He nodded his head approvingly.
“You are quite right to go,” he said, “and they are gentlemen, as I admit. If war is like a good dinner and our gentlemen dine sometimes—that doesn’t concern you. Strasburg will suffer, but you have English friends—ah, your friends are English, Madame?”
She smiled.
“And if they are not?”
“In that case we must make the most of a bad job,” he said bluntly.
She looked up at him quickly to read a face hardened in a gravity very foreign to it. But he did not speak, and they had left the high-road now and were in the heart of the forest of Hagenau. In and out, by woodland paths, through avenues of chestnuts, past little churches which spoke of God’s peace and of all the primitive forest life, the cross-road carried them. All the hubbub and turmoil of the great highway was hushed here. Impossible to believe, as the wind stirred the trees to a murmur of song and the glades opened their golden hearts to the wayfarer, that the things of yesterday had been truths. War was an hallucination of their sleep. There had been no battle. Such contrasts were beyond the possibilities.
“Who could realise that we were at Wörth this morning?” she exclaimed, as a turn of the road opened to their view scenes of a remoter and even more sylvan beauty. “Is there anyone in these woods who would understand that a great army is all around us, and that those poor fellows lie dying in the vineyards? I don’t believe, I cannot believe—”
Richard Watts smoked on doggedly, but presently he pulled up the pony suddenly.
“Look there, young lady,” he said, as he jerked his whip in the direction of a great tree; “there is something to help your incredulity.”
Her eyes turned toward the place, and she shuddered at that which the glade had hidden from her.