guns, and gas, and airplanes over the slopes of the east which the English held.
And not alone Mirevaux so dreamed. Many persons of far wider information than the French peasants and without the French folks' love of their own home farms to influence them, also imagined Mirevaux quite safe—the hard-headed and quite practical, though impulsive persons who made up a certain American committee for the restoration of war-ravaged lands, had moved, and seconded, and decreed in committee meeting that Mirevaux was definitely and finally removed from the zone of invasion and, therefore, that the committee's representative in Mirevaux should be authorized to expend for temporary and permanent restoration so many thousands of francs a month.
It was the useful expenditure of these sums which had brought Ruth Alden, as assistant and associate to Mrs. Gregory Mayhew, to Mirevaux from Roisel in the first week of March and which, upon the quiet moonlit evening of that Wednesday, the twentieth, detained Ruth at the cottage of old Grandmère Bergues, who with her grandchildren—Victor and petite Marie—had outstayed the German occupation of Mirevaux from August of the first year of the war to the great retreat of February, 1917, when the enemy went back to the Hindenburg line, destroying unremovable property and devastating orchard and farm.
Grand'mère Bergues stood at the door of the little cottage which, last autumn, had been restored as well as obtainable materials permitted. The moon shone down upon what had been an orchard; but the Germans, before
