Should she tell the Baroness the truth?
For a second the girl, pale with agitation, hesitated. The awfulness of such sudden news might unnerve her. She had a weak heart.
No. She would conceal her knowledge of the awful fact.
She drew a deep breath and, opening the door, entered smiling, as she exclaimed with a wonderfully careless and nonchalant air:
“Oh! the man only wants to talk to father on business, I told him he would be here to-night to dinner.”
Chapter Six.
In the Trenches before Liège.
At that same moment when Aimée had listened to the dread news over the telephone, Edmond Valentin, in the uniform of a sous-officier of Chasseurs-à-pied, in his heavy dark-green overcoat and peaked shako, with his bulging haversack upon his back, was kneeling in a hastily dug trench firing steadily across the broad sunlit river, which lay deep in its valley.