“Can’t You Guess at Least Something of My Reason?”

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. A March Day 7

II. The Château Yvonne 20

III. The Retreat 31

IV. The Road to Paris 47

V. Armistice Day in Paris 57

VI. Versailles 71

VII. Next Morning 83

VIII. A Home in Versailles 96

IX. The Dinner Party 111

X. Plans and Purposes 125

XI. A Day in Paris 139

XII. Peace 159

XIII. A Pilgrimage 172

XIV. Foundation Stones 184

XV. An Intimate Conversation 197

XVI. Another Afternoon 216

XVII. An Unexpected Intrusion 229

XVIII. One Afternoon 241

XIX. L’Envoi to Glorious France 253

ILLUSTRATIONS

“Can’t You Guess at Least Something of My Reason?” Frontispiece

PAGE

“It Was Impossible to Climb the Wall” 81

“They Were Both too Angry to Pay the Slightest Attention to Her!” 165

“She Was Able to Talk and Tell Me What She Had Endured“ 227

The Camp Fire Girls in
Glorious France

CHAPTER I
A March Day

One afternoon in March, the windows of an old French farmhouse stood open, the curtains blowing in the breeze like white flags of truce, while from indoors came the murmur of a number of voices, girls’ voices, gay and animated and speaking in English, not French.

The next moment there was a brief silence; afterwards one of them began singing, with an odd foreign accent, a song strange to hear in this French countryside, the song of an American camp fire:

A murmur of applause, and then a group of girls in Camp Fire costumes stepped out of the house and into the front yard. The March afternoon was unusually warm with a flood of pale sunshine covering the landscape, the sky was a delicate blue, the clouds changing into fantastic shapes. Beyond, the open country was showing little patches of green in the upturned fields; on the branches of a few newly planted fruit trees were tiny buds.

“I want to congratulate you, Bettina, on your original Camp Fire song,” one of the girls declared. She had dark hair with red lights in it, a slightly tanned skin, a little slender