The Garden of Swords by Max Pemberton

Beatrix was in the arbour of the chalet, filling a bowl with the pink roses which were the pride of her garden, when Edmond came up the road from the village of Elsasshausen and held up his letters triumphantly. Ten days had passed since the bells of Strasburg rang for Madame Helene's grandchild. To Beatrix they had been as an unbroken hour of sunshine and of happiness. The hills and the valleys, the vineyards and farms of that pastoral scene were in keeping with the new sense of rest and of finality which had come upon her life. She wished for no friendship there, save the friendship which had been given her. The strange past, with its memories of strife and solitude and change unending, had been obliterated and forgotten. She had no longer the desire to return to England or to remember that she was an Englishwoman. A languorous indolence, bred of the mountains, possessed her as an ecstasy. She would have been content to hear that the chalet in the woods above the town of Woerth was to be her home until the end.

She was in the garden of the chalet, filling her bowl with roses, when Edmond returned with the letters which he had desired unceasingly. She could not understand that state of mind which hungered so greedily for all the dry bones of a soldier's gossip. To know that old Helene was well, to hear of her horse and her dogs -- and of old Susanne, who had been her mother's servant -- that was news enough. But to be told that the sun was shining, or that Therese Lavencourt had gone to Dieppe, or that Lieutenant Jourda de Vaux had been seen on a new charger -- what were such things to those who had the forests of the Vosges for their skyline, and in the valleys below them the trailing vines and the white houses of the villages, and the murmur of brooks, and the sleepy river warming itself in the glorious sunshine of the ripened summer? She wished to forget Strasburg. The chalet of the Niederwald, the chalet of the pines, the chalet above the old-world town of Woerth -- she would remember it always as the guest house of her dreams, the rose-girt cradle of her love.