Flossie interrupted. “How about being quite frank?” she suggested. “Suppose we do love one another. How about putting it that way?” There was but one other woman at the hospital. It had been a farmhouse. The man and both sons had been killed during the first year of the war, and the woman had asked to be allowed to stay on. Her name was Madame Lelanne. She was useful by reason of her great physical strength. She could take up a man as he lay and carry him on her outstretched arms. It was an expressionless face, with dull, slow-moving eyes that never changed. She and Joan shared a small grenier in one of the barns. Joan had brought with her a camp bedstead; but the woman, wrapping a blanket round her, would creep into a hole she had made for herself among the hay. She never took off her clothes, except the great wooden-soled boots, so far as Joan could discover.!

“What do you think of him?” he said, without looking at her. “It can be a respectable ambition,” suggested Joan.

He met Joan, radiant, a morning or two later. The English Government had resigned and preparations for a general election were already on foot. “A section of the Paris Press is doing all it can to help him, of course,” explained Mrs. Denton. “It doesn’t seem to matter to them that Germany is only waiting her opportunity, and that, if Russia comes in, it is bound to bring Austria. Europe will pay dearly one day for the luxury of a free Press.” “Why is the Press always so eager for war?” mused Joan. “According to their own account, war doesn’t pay them.”