“I’m just running round to the doctor’s,” she whispered. “His medicine hasn’t come. I shan’t be long.” He gave her his address in Paris where he was returning almost immediately.!

The speaker sat a little way apart. The light from the oil lamp, suspended from the ceiling, fell upon his face. He wore a peasant’s blouse. It seemed to her a face she knew. Possibly she had passed him in the village street and had looked at him without remembering. It was his eyes that for long years afterwards still haunted her. She did not notice at the time what language he was speaking. But there were none who did not understand him. He looked at her sharply across the corner of the desk.

“As friends of Mary Stopperton,” he said, “we meet on neutral ground. But in all matters of moment I expect we are as far asunder as the poles. I stand for the People.” “I’se tooked them off,” explained Joan. A piece of information that really, all things considered, seemed unnecessary. Space did not allow of any separation; broken Frenchmen and broken Germans would often lie side by side. Joan would wonder, with a grim smile to herself, what the patriotic Press of the different countries would have thought had they been there to have overheard the conversations. Neither France nor Germany appeared to be the enemy, but a thing called “They,” a mysterious power that worked its will upon them both from a place they always spoke of as “Back there.” One day the talk fell on courage. A young French soldier was holding forth when Joan entered the hut.