He fumbled, and brought out a strip of paper on which was written the name of a town in the centre of France.

"There's where they were a year ago. . . . Yes, you may say: there's a family gone—wiped out. How often I've seen them all sitting there, laughing and drinking coffee under the arbour! They were not rich, but they were happy, and proud of each other. That's over."

He went back to his hoeing.

After that, whenever Troy Belknap got back to Paris, he hunted for the surviving Gantiers. For a long time he could get no trace of them; then he remembered his old governess, Mme. Lebuc, for whom Mrs. Belknap had found employment in a refugee bureau.

He ran down Mme. Lebuc, who was still at her desk in the same big room, facing a row of horse-hair benches packed with tired people waiting their turn for a clothing-ticket or a restaurant card.

Mme. Lebuc had grown much older, and her filmy eyes peered anxiously through large spectacles before she recognized Troy. Then, after tears and raptures, he set forth his errand, and she began to peer again anxiously, shuffling about the bits of paper on the desk, and confusing her records hopelessly.

"Why, is that you?" cried a gay young voice; and there, on the other side of the room, sat one of the young war-goddesses of the Belknap tennis court, trim, uniformed, important, with a row of bent backs in shabby black before her desk.

"Ah, Miss Batchford will tell you—she's so quick and clever," Mme. Lebuc sighed, resigning herself to chronic bewilderment.

Troy crossed to the other desk. An old woman sat before it, in threadbare mourning, a crape veil on her twitching head. She spoke in a low voice, slowly, taking a long time to explain; each one of Miss Batchford's quick questions put her back, and she had to begin all over again.

"Oh, these refugees!" cried Miss Batchford, stretching a bangled arm above the crape veil to clasp Troy's hand. "Do sit down, Mr. Belknap. Dépêchez-vous, s'il vous plaît," she said, not too unkindly, to the old woman; and added, to Troy: "There's no satisfying them."

At the sound of Troy's name, the old woman had turned her twitching head, putting back her veil. Her eyes met Troy's, and they looked at each other doubtfully. Then—"Madame Gantier!" he exclaimed.

"Yes, yes," she said, the tears running down her face.

Troy was not sure if she recognized him, though his name had evidently called up some vague association. He saw that most things had grown far off to her, and that for the moment her whole mind was centred on the painful and humiliating effort of putting her case to this strange young woman who snapped out questions like a machine.

"Do you know her?" asked Miss Batchford, surprised.

"I used to, I believe," Troy answered.

"You can't think what she wants—just everything! They're all alike. She wants to borrow five hundred francs to furnish a flat for herself and her sister."