"I swear it," said he.
When they reached the hotel, she swiftly discarded the walking clothes and slipped on her wrapper in which only was she the real Elodie, and went to his room and sat on the little narrow bed.
"Mon ami," said she, "I have something to tell you. I would not speak this afternoon because it was necessary that nothing should disturb your performance."
Andrew lit a pipe and sat down in the straight-backed arm-chair.
"What's the matter?"
"I had to wait an hour at the dentist's. Why those people say one o'clock when they mean two, except to make you think they are so busy that they do you a favour to look inside your mouth, and can charge you whatever they like--thirty francs, the monster charged me--you ought to go and tell him it was a robbery--"
"My dear," he interrupted, thus cutting out the predicate of her rhetorical sentence, "you surely couldn't have thought a dentist's fee of thirty francs would have put me off my work?"
She threw up her arms. "Mon Dieu! Men are stupid! No. Listen. I had to wait an hour. I had to distract myself--well--you know the supplement to L'Illustration that has appeared every week during the war--the pages of photographs of the heroes of France. I found them all collected in a portfolio on the table. Ah! Some living, but mostly dead. It was heart-breaking. And do you know what I found? I found this. I stole it."
She drew from her pocket peignoir a crumpled page covered with vignette photographs of soldiers, a legend underneath each one, and handed it to Andrew, her thumb indicating a particular portrait.
"There! Look!"