“I’m willing enough,” answered Flossie. “But what about Old Mother Nature? She’s going to be in this, you know.” “Thanks,” he answered. “I may ask you to later on. But just now—” He paused.!

“The difficulty I have always been up against,” explained her father, “has been their suspicion. ‘What’s the cunning old rascal up to now? What’s his little game?’ That is always what I have felt they were thinking to themselves whenever I have wanted to do anything for them. It isn’t anything he says to them. It seems to be just he, himself.” Joan was not in a comprehending mood.

“Poor old girl!” he added. “I believe she’d have been happier if I’d always remained plain Bob Phillips.” Joan set herself to make McKean talk, and after a time succeeded. They had a mutual friend, a raw-boned youth she had met at Cambridge. He was engaged to McKean’s sister. His eyes lighted up when he spoke of his sister Jenny. The Little Mother, he called her. “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.