"A grandfather?" Lucien exclaimed. Even knowing what was coming, he found himself surprised. But I am too young to be a grandfather! he wanted to cry. Foolishness, of course: if he had a married daughter, he was not too young to be a grandfather. Still, he felt as if he were.

He looked down at his hands, gnarled and scarred and cal-lused by years of farm work, tanned by the sun when there was sun, roughened by the wind and the snow. They were not the hands of a man too young to be a grandfather.

From them, he looked to Marie. She, without any possible doubt, was too young to be a grandmother. But her beaming face said she didn't think so. It also said she looked forward to the role.

"What of me?" Georges said with fine mock anger. "I will be an uncle next year, but do you say one word about that? No! You leave it to me to figure out for myself. Is that fair? Is that just?"

Nicole said, "What you will be next year is what you are this year and what you have always been: a nuisance."

"Thank you." Georges nodded, as at a great compliment.

"We'll be aunts," Susanne and Denise and Jeanne chorused. Jeanne, who was the youngest of them, added, "I can't wait!"

"You'll have to," Nicole said. "I am not ready to have the baby just yet."

Lucien got up from his chair and embraced his daughter. "Congratulations," he said. "May all be well. May all be well with you always." He let her go and shook his son-in-law's hand. "Who would have thought I would have a grandchild named O'Doull?"

The young doctor's eyes twinkled. "See what you get for letting your daughter go to work in the American hospital?"

"At the time," Galtier said gravely, "I did not think that a good idea. Perhaps I was right" Leonard O'Doull just grinned at him. He had to wait for Nicole to let out an irate squawk before he could go on, "Perhaps, too, I was wrong. But only perhaps, mind you." Someone-he did not see who-had filled his glass with applejack again. If it was full, it needed emptying. Before the war, he'd never imagined a half-American grandchild. Now, though, he discovered he liked the idea.

Jonathan Moss sat in a coffeehouse not far outside the Northwestern University campus. A breeze from Lake Michigan ruffled his light brown hair. An internal breeze ruffled his thoughts.

"What's the matter, Johnny my boy?" asked his companion at the table, a curly-haired fellow named Fred Sandburg. "You look like you've got bullets whizzing past your head again."

Sandburg had served on the Roanoke front in Virginia, helping to take the riverside town of Big Lick and the nearby iron mines away from the Confederate States. That had been some of the worst fighting of the whole war. He knew all about bullets flying past his head. He had a Purple Heart with an oak-leaf cluster to show how much he knew.

He knew more about it than did Jonathan Moss, and Moss would have been the first to admit as much. He'd been a flier up in Ontario through the fighting, and never had been shot. When the war was new, he'd thought of himself as a cavalier, meeting other cavaliers in single combat. Three years of flying had convinced him he was as much a gear in a killing machine as an infantryman in the mud. Only the pay and the view and the hours were better.

Moss sipped at his coffee. Conversation buzzed in the background. It was the sort of coffeehouse where vast issues were hashed out and settled every day: the nature of the universe, the effect of the war on the history of the world, whether the waitress would go home with the college kid who'd propositioned her. Vast issues whirled through Moss' head, too.

"I'm trying to sort out whether I really give a damn about studying the law," he said.

"Ah," said Sandburg, who was also in law school. "You finished your first year before the war started, same as I did, right?"

"You know I did," Moss answered. "Then, it seemed important. Now… I have a tough time caring now. I guess the war made me look at the scale of things differently, if you know what I mean. I mean, in the big picture, what difference does it make whether or not I hang out my shingle and start drafting wills for wheat traders with more money than sense?"

"Maybe it doesn't make any difference in the big picture," his friend said. "It sure as hell does make a difference in the way your life goes. Don't you care about that? Me, I want to be in a spot where nobody can make me pick up a Springfield for the rest of my days."

"Something to that, no doubt about it," Moss admitted. He finished his coffee and waved to the waitress for another cup. Had she said she would go home with the student or she wouldn't? Try as he would, Moss couldn't tell. "But I have trouble giving a damn. I have trouble giving a damn about almost everything."

"Aha!' Fred Sandburg stabbed out a forefinger. He would make a formidable attorney: he listened. "Almost everything, eh? All right, Johnny my boy, what do you give a damn about?"

Suddenly, Moss wished the coffee the waitress brought were whiskey. In the officers' clubs during the war, he'd had plenty of high-proof lubrication against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He'd needed it, too. He needed it now, needed it and didn't have it. At last, slowly, he said, "Up in Ontario, in Canada, there was this girl, this woman…" He ran out of steam.

"Oho!" Sandburg laid that forefinger by the side of his nose. "Was she pretty? Was she built?" His hands described an hourglass in the air.

"Yeah, I guess so," Moss answered, a puzzled tone in his voice: he wasn't really quite sure. "She was… interesting." He nodded. That was the right word. He repeated it: "Interesting."

"Hell with whether she was interesting," said Sandburg, a relentlessly practical man. "Was she interested?"

"In me?" Moss laughed. "Only to spit in my eye. Her name's Laura Secord. She's somehow related to the original who had the same name a hundred years ago, and played Paul Revere against the USA in the War of 1812. She hates Americans. She told me where to head in I don't know how many times. Besides," he added morosely, "she's got a husband."

"Oh, bully." Fred Sandburg made silent, sardonic clapping motions. "You sure know how to pick 'em, don't you?"

"Sure do," Moss said. "Last time I saw her was just after the Canucks surrendered. I drove over from Orangeville, where our last aerodrome was, back to this little town called Arthur, where it had been. She was keeping a farm going there. She didn't know whether her husband was alive or dead. She hadn't heard from him in a long time-he was in the Canadian Army. But everything would be ready for him if he came down the road."

"So if she was keeping the home fires burning for him, what did she say to you?" Sandburg asked.

Moss' face heated at the memory. "She told me she never wanted to set eyes on me again. She told me she wished the Canucks had shot me down. She told me she wished her husband had fired the bullet that shot me down. She told me she hoped the train I took back to the USA went off the rails and smashed to bits. After that, she got angry."

Fred Sandburg stared, then started to guffaw. "And you call this broad interesting? Jesus Christ, Johnny my boy, you can go down to New Mexico and marry a rattlesnake and do it cheaper. You'll live happier, too."

"Maybe," Moss said. "Probably, even." His grin lifted up only one corner of his mouth, making it more grimace than smile. "But I can't get her out of my mind."

Sandburg was just warming to his theme: "Or you could take to drinking absinthe to forget, or smoking cigarettes doped with opium or hashish. Then if she ever saw you again, she'd take pity on you because you were so pale and wasted and decadent-looking, and clutch you to her bosom." He leaned forward and made as if to clutch Moss to his bosom.

"Funny," Moss said, evading him. "Funny like a crutch." With so many veterans on one crutch or two these days, the cliche had taken on fresh life.