As she came past Smith and Glenn, trailing her hoe, the latter now sufficiently proficient in French, said gaily:
"Have you heard from Jack again, Mamzelle Maryette?"
"I hear from Djack by every mail," she said, with all the transparent honesty that characterized her.
Smith grinned:
"Just like that! Well, tell him from me to quit fooling away his time in a hospital and come and get you or somebody is going to steal you."
The girl was very happy; she stood there in the September sunshine leaning on her hoe and gazing half shyly, half humorously down the river where a string of American mules was being watered.
Mellow Ethiopian laughter sounded from the distance as the Baton Rouge negroes exchanged pleasantries in limited French with a couple of gendarmes on the bank above them. And there, in the sunshine of the little garden by the river, war and death seemed very far away. Only at intervals the veering breeze brought to Sainte Lesse the immense vibration of the cannonade; only at intervals the high sky-clatter of an airplane reminded the village that the front was only a little north[pg 266] of Nivelle, and that what had been Nivelle was not so very far away.
"If you were my girl, Maryette," remarked Smith, "I'd die of worry in that hospital."