He nodded his head sympathetically, described how the peasants of the Aisne valley crept back to their farms, continued their field-tasks close behind the trenches, apparently indifferent to the shrapnel and the _marmites_.
"Yes," she murmured, gazing thoughtfully into the fire, "amidst so much death the flame of life burns ever higher, will not, must not be extinguished."
There was a little pause, during which the colonel sipped his coffee. Lightly, with the smile of a prima ballerina pirouetting away from a serious posture into which she would have you believe she fell unwittingly, the countess commenced to talk of Paris of the days before the war. With a young enthusiasm she spoke of her morning rides in the Bois, of restaurants and dinner-parties--mentioning a name here and there that might lead to the discovery of a mutual acquaintance, of concerts and the play. The colonel listened, speaking little, seeing her--though she did not so much as hint at them--circled by a crowd of admirers.
"And madame," she said innocently, "does she inhabit Paris?"
"Madame----?" He was obviously at a loss.
"But," she persisted gently, "you have doubtless friends in Paris? A man such as you----" she stopped, smiling. "I am indiscreet."
"Madame," he replied in a quiet voice, "I have been in Africa for more than twenty years. The Paris I knew exists no more."
She turned her gaze full on him. The freshness of the man appeared suddenly to her. An involuntary little blush suffused her face. She covered it by a slight withdrawal from the fire.
He spoke at first depreciatingly of the country, the grave of so many of France's best, so remote from all that to a Frenchman makes life worth while. Then as he warmed to his description she saw that he loved that parched land of immense distances where the pitiless sun consumes the human soul or heats it to an intense unworldly fervour. He told of interminable marches over the glowing sands, of forgotten skirmishes where a wound was worse than death, of fierce razzias, of lonely outpost nights in the desert underneath a miracle of stars, where under the naked presence of the infinite one watched, finger on trigger, for the gleam of a creeping burnous. She found herself seeking to detect a deliberate elimination of the feminine in his reminiscences. With sure instinct she felt there was a woman somewhere in the background. How far back?