newspapers and stare at each other for occupation while the all-powerful
driver and _Wattmann_, climbing down from the opposite ends of the car,
conferred together in the street. "It's waiting for the other tram!" And
even as she said it, she found the clock behind her back had leapt
mysteriously and slyly forward. "I'll take the other...." And, going
downstairs, she stood in the shelter of her doorway, out of the cold
wind that blew along the street. The delay of the other car brought her
well up to her hour. "I'll even be a little late," she thought, proud
of herself.

"Don't talk to the _Wattmann_," said the notices in the tramcar crossly
to her in German as she slipped and slid upon its straining seats.
"Don't spit, don't smoke ... don't...." But she had her revenge, for
across all the notices _her_ side of the war had written coldly: "You
are begged, in the measure possible to you, to talk only French."

When they got into the narrow town the tramcar, mysteriously swelling,
seemed to chip the shop windows and bump the front doors, and people
upon the pavement scrambled between the glass of the tram and the glass
of the big drapery shop.

They met, as it were, in the very centre of a conversation. "I never
know where you are," he complained, as though this trouble was so in his
thoughts that he must speak of it at once, "or when I shall see you
again." She smiled radiantly, busier with greeting, less absorbed
than he.

"You may go away and never come back. You go so far."

She went away often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at