He explained that he had been listening to the band in the gardens, returning by the Quai d’Orsay. “I think God must want you very badly,” she said, “or He wouldn’t have laid so heavy a cross upon you. You will come?”!

Mrs. Phillips’s thin hands were playing nervously with the bed clothes. There still seemed something that she had to say. As if Joan hadn’t thought of everything. Her eyes were fixed upon the narrow strip of light between the window curtains. “Quick,” said the doctor. He pushed her in front of him, and she almost fell down a flight of mud-covered steps that led into the earth. She found herself in a long, low gallery, lighted by a dim oil lamp, suspended from the blackened roof. A shelf ran along one side of it, covered with straw. Three men lay there. The straw was soaked with their blood. They had been brought in the night before by the stretcher-bearers. A young surgeon was rearranging their splints and bandages, and redressing their wounds. They would lie there for another hour or so, and then start for their twenty kilometre drive over shell-ridden roads to one or another of the great hospitals at the base. While she was there, two more cases were brought in. The doctor gave but a glance at the first one and then made a sign; and the bearers passed on with him to the further end of the gallery. He seemed to understand, for he gave a low, despairing cry and the tears sprang to his eyes. He was but a boy. The other had a foot torn off. One of the orderlies gave him two round pieces of wood to hold in his hands while the young surgeon cut away the hanging flesh and bound up the stump.

“How do you mean ‘in his way’?” demanded Joan. It certainly, if Froude was to be trusted, could not have been the orthodox way. “No,” she answered, “it could be circulated just as well from, say, Birmingham or Manchester.” “Don’t make me feel I’ve interfered with your work only to spoil it,” said Joan.