"Or he would have!" continued Otto: "had not his mother, the Countess, come flying to the rescue and carried him off, nobody knows where!..."
Adelaide's eyes blazed. She said in a tone of haughty nonchalance:
"Count Valverden is now with the first Army, advancing toward Metz.... He says he hopes to win the silver sword-knot before the close of the campaign."
"You correspond?" the Hussar asked, grinning, as the driver signified impatience by kicking the back of the box-seat. Both officers got out of the carriage as Adelaide answered coldly:
"He often writes to me."
The driver, ignored, opened a little padded trap-hole in the front part of the vehicle. He clapped his mouth to it and shouted in the Flemish tongue:
"Geef my U address!"
Adelaide gave the name of the Hôtel des Postes. The officers kissed her hand and said they would call there on the morrow. They waved as the fiacre rumbled out of the station. Adelaide waved back, and issued quite another direction through the driver's trap-hole. And the fiacre went jingling through the old-world streets of the castled town that sits on the broad flowing river whose bridge was crowded with French and Belgian officers, chatting, smoking and discussing the news of the War.
Presently they were free of the streets, roaring with the tongues of many nations, choked with trains of French wounded, Red Cross columns, Sisters, surgeons, bearers, carriages full of visitors, and more processions of officers on parole. The fiacre lumbered at a good pace behind its pair of heavy-hocked Flemish horses along a wide, straight road, with plains on either side. And presently tall black wooden observation-towers marked the frontier where Belgian videttes and outposts amicably fraternized with French.
Kilometer posts of wood instead of stone.... The dear French language in the mouths of people. Breasting hills covered with woods, instead of fallow plains, intersected with level roads bordered with eternal poplar-trees.