"_I am thy child_," crooned Pan, with a new note to his chant that immediately started on my heartstrings. "And I'm tired," he added as he stretched himself on the rock beside me, laid his head on my breast, and nuzzled his lips into my bare throat.
"I'm going to lift the crests and look at the tips of your ears, Pan," I said as I held him tight.
I did, and the tips were--I never intend to tell.
The lights were twinkling out in the valley one by one, and the young moon made the purple blackness below us only faintly luminous when Pan drew me closer and then into the very edge of the world itself, and pointed down into the soft darkness.
"We are all like that, we natives of this great land--asleep in the midst of a silvery mist, while the rest of the world is in the blaze of hell. We've got to wake up and take them to our breast, to nourish and warm and save them. There'll be just you and I and a few others to call the rest of our people until they hear and value and work," he said as he settled me against him so that the twain chants of our heartstrings became one.
"I'll follow you through the woods and help you call, Adam," I said softly, with my lips under the red crest nearest to me.
"And I'll bring you back here to nest and stay with you until your young are on their feet, with their eyes open," Pan crooned against my lips. "Dear God, what a force unit one woman and one man can create!"
This is not a story of laughter or tears, of shock or depression. It has no manufactured gloom. It preaches no reform. It has not a single social problem around which the characters move and argue and agonize. No reader need lie awake at night wondering what the author meant; all she intends to convey goes over the top with the first sight of the printed words. The story invites the reader to be thrilled, and dares him (or her) to weep.
Briefly, "The Firefly of France" is in the manner of the romance--in the manner of Dumas, of Walter Scott. It is a story of love, mystery, danger, and daring. It opens in the gorgeous St. Ives Hotel in New York and ends behind the Allied lines in France. The story gets on its way on the first page, and the interest is continuous and increasing until the last page. And it is all beautifully done.