Verdun by night, Verdun by starlight, awaited her.

Up the slopes of the hill, every spar, brick and beam, carried its
bristle of gold. At her own head's imperceptible movement flashes came
and went between the ribs of the Bishop's Palace. The sentry by the
tunnel stood between the upper and the underground:--with his left eye
he could watch the lights that strung back into the hollow hill, with
his right, the smiling and winking of the stars in the sky.

"Fait beau dehors." His voice startled her. She turned to him, but he
stood immobile in the shadow as though he had never spoken. She could
not be sure that he had indicated to her that every man has his taste
and his choice.

She set to work on her car which stood in the shelter of an archway
opposite, and for half an hour the sky trembled unregarded above her
head. When she had finished she stood back and gazed at the Rochet with
an anxious friendly enmity--the friendship of an infant with a lion.
"The garage is eighty miles away," she sighed, "with its friendly men
who know all where I know so little.... Ah, do I know enough? What have
I left undone?" For she felt, what was the truth, that the whole
expedition depended on her, that the stately Russian had perhaps never
known what it was to have a breakdown--that in Moscow, in Petrograd, in
his faraway life, he had sat in town cars behind two chauffeurs, unaware
of the deadly traps in rubber and metal.




CHAPTER V