"You have lived to help what is going on yonder," remarked Halkett.
She turned, the question in her eyes; and he answered seriously:
"Since yesterday. So what you did for me when you saved my papers, you did for a friend to France."
Her sudden emotion left her silent; she bent her head and looked down at her knitting, and leisurely resumed it, sitting so, her legs hanging down from the wall, the sun striking her silver shoe buckles.
"Do you hear, Philippa?" asked Warner, smiling. "You have added reason to be proud of the wound on your lip."
She flashed a look at him, laughed shyly, and became very busy with her knitting and with watching the passing column across the river.
Halkett had unslung his field glasses to inspect them at closer range. The dusty _fantassins_ were swinging along at a smart route step, rifles slung, red képis askew, their bulky luggage piled on their backs and flopping on their thighs—the same careless, untidy, slipshod infantry with the same active, tireless, reckless, rakish allure.
Their smartly mounted officers, smartly booted or gaitered, wearing the smart tunics and gold-laced caps of their arm of the service, seemed merely to accent the gayly dowdy, ill-fitting uniforms of the little _fantassins_.
No British officer could, on his soul and conscience, subscribe to such flapping, misfitting, fag-ends of military accouterments; and as Halkett watched them a singularly wooden expression came over his pleasant, youthful features; and Warner, glancing sideways at him, knew why.
"They’re very picturesque if a painter handles them properly," he remarked, amused. "You know what De Neuville did for them."
Philippa, not comprehending, continued to knit and to gaze out of her lovely grey eyes upon her beloved _fantassins_.
Ariadne, seeing her three friends aloft, presently mounted to the top of the wall beside them, and sat gravely blinking into space through slitted eyes.
A glazier had come across the fields from some neighboring hamlet, bringing with him under his ragged arm some panes of glass and a bag of implements.
He was in a hurry, because he was expecting that his class would be called to the colors, but the spectacle of the passing infantry across the river so fascinated him that he made but a slow job of it.