spite of my kind American friends. She and Michelle are coming to Badheim for the Noël.” 
At this, Lucy was struck so speechless with delight there was a pause before she could put into words her joyful amazement. “Coming here? Oh, Captain de la Tour, isn’t it good news? I can’t tell you—you can’t guess how glad I am!” 
Lucy’s hazel eyes sparkled with the words and her whole face lighted up. Perhaps never until that moment had she realized the place Michelle held in her heart. Now, at this lucky chance to review in peace and security the friendship woven among such sad and peril-haunted days she felt a thrill of happiness that raised her spirits almost to their old-time level. 
Captain de la Tour watched her with quick sympathy, his pale lips touched for an instant by the brief, radiant smile which could so strikingly change both his and Michelle’s faces from their thoughtful gravity. Lucy longed to ask all about her friend, of whom she had caught so short a glimpse on the eleventh of November, but she had not another moment to spare. “When will they come?” she lingered to ask. 
“This week, I think. I am waiting every day to hear,” said Captain de la Tour, his voice filled with eager hope. “I have not seen them since the war ended. I was shot through the lungs the day of the armistice.” 
When the luncheon hour was over, Miss Pearse said to Lucy, “This is a good chance to do what Miss Webster asked me to find time for. She wants us to go with the orderlies to the spring in the forest and see to the bottling of the water. It won’t take long.” 
Lucy was thinking so much about all she would have to tell Michelle that she hardly noticed what Miss Pearse said, but followed her in obedient silence across the clearing behind the hospital and into the woodland. In front of them went two Hospital Corps men drawing hand-carts filled with empty bottles. 
There was no snow yet on the ground and, beneath the trees, it was carpeted with moss and pine needles so that footsteps were hushed and the sigh of the branches overhead made so deep and steady a murmur that the forest seemed all at once to have an atmosphere of its own. A great peace pervaded it so that even the soldiers spoke involuntarily in low tones, and glanced about them with a kind of solemnity at the tall trunks of the firs and hemlocks, with here and there an oak spreading its wide, bare branches. 
The sunlight shone down with a golden gleam into the dim greenness of forest aisles stretching endlessly on every side. 
Lucy walked on in enchanted silence. She thought she had never known anything more lovely than this murmurous stillness, the soft carpet beneath her feet, the great evergreen trees closing in around her and the cold, pine-laden air against her face. The mysterious scamper of shy woodland 

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