Our conversation was interrupted by a figure that slipped out of the darkness of some doorway, hesitated before us, and then spoke in French.
"You are English officers? May I speak with you?"
It was a girl, whom I could see only vaguely in the darkness—she stood in the shadow of a doorway beyond the moonlight—and I answered her that I was English and my friend American.
"Is there any way," she asked, "of travelling from Lille, perhaps to Paris? In a motor-car, for example? To-night?"
I laughed at this startling request, put so abruptly. It was already nine o'clock at night!
"Not the smallest chance in the world, mademoiselle! Paris is far from Lille."
"I was stupid," said the girl. "Not all the way to Paris, but to some town outside Lille. Any town. There are motor-cars always passing through the streets. I thought if I could get a little place in one"
"It is difficult," I said. "As a matter of fact, it is forbidden for officers to take civilians except in case of saving them from danger—in shelled places."
She came suddenly out of the shadow into the moonlight, and I saw that she was a girl with red hair and a face strangely white. I knew by the way she spoke—the accent—as well as by the neatness of her dress, that she was not a working-girl. She was trembling painfully, and took hold of my arm with both her hands.
