"Let's all go and find out."
So they went, and managed very successfully to forget war and even
stepmothers. They were all little more than children in enjoyment of
simple pleasures still, since war had fallen upon them at the very
threshold of life, cutting them off from all the cheery happenings that
are the natural inheritance of all young things. The years that would
ordinarily have seen them growing tired of play had been spent in grim
tasks; now they were children again, clamouring for the playtime they
had lost. They found enormous pleasure in the funny little French
restaurant, where Madame, a lady whose sympathies were as boundless
as her waist, welcomed them with wide smiles, delighting in the
broken French of Billy and Harrison, and deftly tempting them to fresh
excursions in her language. She put a question in infantile French to
Bob presently, whereupon that guileless youth, with a childlike smile,
answered her with a flood of idiomatic phrases, in an accent purer than
her own--collapsing with helpless laughter at her amazed face. After
which, Madame neglected her other patrons to hover about their table
like a stout, presiding goddess, guiding them gently to the best dishes
on the menu, and occasionally putting aside their own selection with a
hasty, "Mon-non; you vill not like that one to-day." She patted Cecilia
in a motherly fashion at parting, and their bill was only about half
what it should have been.
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