“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. “I am going,” he said, “where there is just the possibility of an accident: one never knows. I wanted to be sure that all was well with you.”!

They neither spoke during the short walk between the two hotels. But at the door she turned and held out her hands to him. “I like the articles you are writing on the History of Superstition. Quite illuminating,” remarked Mr. Simson.

“Oh, yes, there’s no make-believe this time,” answered the girl. “A bad thing for her if he wasn’t.” Mr. Folk was a well-known artist. He lived in Paris. “You are wonderfully like your mother,” he told Joan. “In appearance, I mean,” he added. “I knew her when she was Miss Caxton. I acted with her in America.” It seemed, in spite of its open door, a very silent little house behind its strip of garden. Joan had the feeling that it was listening.