Her face was dirty, her hair wind-blown. She was muddy and without a
trace of the smartness for which she had been famous. She was simply a
hard-worked woman in clothes of masculine cut, yet never had she seemed
so beautiful to her lover. He bent and kissed her in the market-place.
He was an undemonstrative Englishman, but there was that in her eyes
which carried him away from self-consciousness.
"I saw McKenzie in Paris," he said. "He told me that you were here."
"We came over together. Did you get my letter?"
"I have had no letters. But now that I have you, nothing matters."
"Really? Somehow I don't feel that I deserve it."
"Deserve what?"
"All that you are giving me. But I have liked to think of it. It has
been a prop to lean on--"
"Only that--?"
"A shield and a buckler, dearest, a cross held high--" Her breath came
quickly.
* * * * * *
They sat side by side on the worn doorstep of a shattered building and
talked.
"I am in a shack--a _baraque_,--they call it," Drusilla told him, "with
three other women. We have fixed up one room a little better than the
others, and whenever the men come through the town some of them drift
in and are warmed by our fire, and I sing to them; they call me 'The
Singing Woman.
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