“Yes, I can never forget it.”

“Then----”

She stepped serenely into the carriage. “Then,” she whispered, “I shall get it, I suppose, when I really want it,” and she swiftly shut the door in his face. “Drive to the hotel of the Duc de Pontchartrain,” was her order.

André swore softly. The Duke was his friend and also perhaps the greatest libertine in Paris. She should not escape him. In a quarter of an hour he was supping with the Duke and his merry crew; women there were in plenty, but this sorceress, the daughter of a Paris flower girl, had neither been invited nor had so much as exchanged a word with his grace. And when André, weary of lansquenet, ribald songs, and copious toasts, slunk to bed with the rising sun he was strangely glad that she had tricked him. But if she was not what she so cynically professed to be what did it mean? And why in her presence did he always have that irritating feeling that somewhere and somehow he had met her before?

THE VIVANDIÈRE OF FONTENOY

THE sun of spring had set on May 10, 1745, the eve of a day memorable in the military annals of the British and French nations. Behind a camp-fire in the entrenchments of Fontenoy André warmed himself, one of the many camp-fires which flared into the dusk on that plain which for two centuries has been the cock-pit of Europe; and as he stared out absently into the swiftly falling night an answering gleam scarcely a mile and a half away yonder to the south-east at Maubray told him that there lay the headquarters of the allied forces of the foe, English, Dutch, and Austrians, commanded by an English prince of the blood-royal, the Duke of Cumberland.

There had been some warm skirmishing to-day. The British and the Austrians by sheer weight of numbers had tumbled out of the enclosures and copses the Pandours and Grassins thrown out as irregular out-posts from the French army; and since then André and St. Benôit with many others had watched the allied generals and their staff reconnoitring at a safe distance the masterly position drawn along the slopes of Fontenoy by Monseigneur le Maréchal de Saxe. A hard nut to crack, gentlemen, these lines, study them through your spy-glasses as you will. Nor will you find it easy to detect the place to push through.

Yes; you may attack any time now night or day, for Tournay to our rear is hard pressed and unless relieved will fall into the hands of our master, Louis XV. Well and good; what better could a Chevau-léger 

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