She looked at him and smiled. “It’s quite easy,” she answered. “I always see her as she lay there with all the sorrow gone from her. She looked so beautiful and kind.” “There are more important things than saving men’s bodies. You think that, don’t you?” he asked.!

He could not see her face. She watched it herself with dim half consciousness as it changed before her in the tawdry mirror above the mantelpiece, half longing that he might look up and see it, half terrified lest he should. “She’s the most beautiful body in all the world,” he said. “Though merely seeing her you mightn’t know it.”

She found him in the uniform of a French Colonel. He had quite a military bearing and seemed pleased with himself. He kissed her hand, and then held her out at arms’ length. How long Joan remained there she was never quite sure. There was little difference between day and night. After it had been quiet for an hour or so, Madame Lelanne would go out, to return a little later with a wounded man upon her back; and when one died, she would throw him across her shoulder and disappear again up the steps. Sometimes it was a Frenchman and sometimes a German she brought in. One gathered that the fight for the village still continued. There was but little they could do for them beyond dressing their wounds and easing their pain. Joan and the little chemist took it in turns to relieve one another. If Madame Lelanne ever slept, it was when she would sit in the shadow behind the stove, her hands upon her knees. Dubos had been in the house when it had fallen. Madame Lelanne had discovered him pinned against a wall underneath a great oak beam that had withstood the falling débris. His beard had been burnt off, but otherwise he had been unharmed. Even the shopman wavered. Joan pressed her advantage; directed Mrs. Phillips’s attention to something a little less awful. Mrs. Phillips yielded.