"Lettice, I've been down to Poupehan!"
Lettice was darning her stockings in the shade of the tower. Lettice would have darned her stockings on the Judgment Day. She suspended her work to look up, slowly, at Dorothea. Rose-brown, panting from the steep hill, lips laughing, eyes sparkling with excitement, she flung herself down among the stubble and the pink convolvuluses and fanned her face with her handkerchief.
"Oh, I'm so hot! I ran nearly the whole way. I went to try for a paper, and I fell over M. Lapouse, and oh, Lettice, what do you think he told me? There's been a French plane brought down near Florenville, and the pilot's escaped, and they're hunting him all over the place! Oh! don't you hope he'll get away?"
Lettice remained looking at her for a minute, then lowered her eyes and slowly resumed her work. Dorothea flounced away with an energy that upset Madame Hasquin's workbasket.
"Well, you are a fish! I did think you'd be interested in this. Don't you want to hear about it? Don't you care?"
"Was—was the man hurt?" asked Lettice.
"No, they don't think so, or not much—he managed to burn his machine, anyway. Oh! don't I wish I'd been there! We might have patched her up between us, and flown her to the French lines. Oh! it would have been sport!"
"It's, it's—it's twenty miles to Florenville, isn't it?" Lettice pursued her train of thought in her own undeviating way.
"Yes, about. Why?"
"And when did it happen?"