“Yes, but it needn’t be you,” suggested Miss Ensor. One of Joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room. Her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.!

“I was going to buy you a present,” he grumbled. “But you wouldn’t let me get up.” “Oh, she’s changed a good deal,” answered Joan. “But I think she’ll get over it all right, if she’s careful.”

“I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know. She taught it to me in those months. I might have learned more if I had let her go on teaching. It was the only way she knew.” They had reached the corner. Joan could see her bus in the distance. The wounded men had heard it also. Dubos had moved forward. Madame Lelanne had risen. It came again, the thin, faint shrill of a distant bugle. Footsteps were descending the stairs. French soldiers, laughing, shouting, were crowding round them.