CHAPTER XXI

One day there came a letter from Gerome.

"I am bringing my wife to stay with you," it said. "Paris is growing uncomfortable for her, for though she is as loyal as I am myself, there are those who are unkind because of her foreign birth. I have leave of absence, as I have important business to talk over with you, my father, and so when I leave for the front, I shall know that Marie is in the care of my mother and Paulette. We shall motor from here sometime on Wednesday, and will probably be with you Thursday evening. Until then----" and the letter ended with the loving messages Gerome always sent his parents, for he was a devoted son.

The General, home for a few days, read the letter aloud, Madame closed her eyes quickly for a moment, to hide the sudden mist that rose to them.

"I shall see my boy again," she said softly, but Paulette, her face sullen, sat staring into space.

"It seems a long while since we saw him," said the General, folding the letter, and putting it back into his breast pocket, "and he must be off again almost at once!"

His wife sighed wistfully.

"We must be grateful that we are to see even this much of our son. How many of our friends will never see theirs again!"

Paulette swung about almost fiercely.

"It isn't only death that keeps them away! Think of the prisoners! Oh, I wish I were a man! To have to sit here idly and wait, is maddening!"

She had finished her training and was daily expecting her commission as a qualified nurse. The inaction, the waiting, was wearing her already suffering nerves to a wire edge.

Her mother cast a quick glance at the General and reaching over, put a gentle hand on the girl's arm.

"Dear child," she began, but Paulette went on almost fiercely.

"Sometimes I feel as though I shall go mad thinking of Maurice, a prisoner in some filthy place, suffering from his wound, with perhaps not even enough to eat!" She bowed her head on the arm of her chair and began weeping bitterly.

The General, helpless as so many men are in the sight of a woman's suffering, paced the room with long, military steps, his hands clutching each other behind his back, his lower lip pursed out under his mustache.

Madame tried to comfort the weeping girl.

"Paulette," she said, "you must be calm, your brother and Marie will arrive at any moment."

The girl sprang to her feet, her eyes flashing, her lips drawn back from her white teeth.

"Why did Gerome ever marry her?" she cried. "Why do we have to have her with us?"

"Paulette," chided her mother, "she is your brother's wife."

The General stopped a moment in his pacing.

"He returns to the front to-morrow," he said. "She must not be left unprotected. It is not her fault that she was born on the other side."

But the girl's pent-up emotion would have expression.

"Who was she?" she demanded. "What was she? We know nothing of her, nothing, excepting that she came from Vienna, and God knows, we have no cause to love anyone who comes from there!"

"Paulette," sighed her mother, "you hurt me, dear, when you talk like that"; and the General added, stern for the first time in his life to this beloved child of his: "Paulette, you must promise me you will be kind to your brother's wife."

The girl still faced them defiantly, her breast heaving with the sobs she was trying to repress.

"How can I?" she cried. "How can I bear any good will to one of those fiends who are responsible for all the suffering of Maurice, for all this terrible agony!"

Madame's eyes were misty as she looked into the drawn face which for the moment, rage had robbed of all its charm.

"Dear child," she said softly, "Marie is not to blame."

"She is, she is, I hate her!" and sobbing hysterically, Paulette turned and ran from the room.

The General shook his head sadly as he looked after her.

"One of the terrible evils of war," he said, "is that it engenders hatred and prejudice that live for generations after the war is over."

He paced the room thoughtfully. Now and then he let his eyes rest fondly on Madame as she bent over her knitting. The quiet, the air of peace that seemed to surround them was in sharp contrast to the distant rumbling where war's savage work was going on.

He had spent his days after retiring from the army, here at his château, cultivating its lands, planting his vineyards, receiving from life what was to him its most treasured possession, peace and contentment.

When the children grew up, and Gerome, following his father's career, entered the army, the General revived his youth in his son's letters, while Madame watching Paulette's romance grow and ripen, relived her own love story.

They were the spirit of that people whose civilization had been measured by the hearth and roof-tree, whose love of the home was the nucleus of that impassible barrier which had opposed the Romans and beaten back Attilla's advancing hordes, and who, now that the enemy was again clamoring at their gates, were prepared to prove that the spirit of their fathers' still lived and would fight to the last drop of their blood to preserve that most sacred thing in the hearts of all people--Home!