He drove her back to Paris, and she promised to come and see him in his studio and let him introduce her to his artist friends. “You mean,” she asked, “that they force themselves upon you, even if you make it plain—”!

The girl rose. “I must be getting back,” she said. “Dad will be wondering where I’ve got to.” She turned and looked at him then. She wondered why she had ever thought him ugly.

“I think God must want you very badly,” she said, “or He wouldn’t have laid so heavy a cross upon you. You will come?” “I suppose she’s satisfied herself that he’s brainy,” she laughed. The other was a young priest. He wore the regulation Red Cross uniform, but kept his cassock hanging on a peg behind his bed. He had pretty frequent occasion to take it down. These small emergency hospitals, within range of the guns, were reserved for only dangerous cases: men whose wounds would not permit of their being carried further; and there never was much more than a sporting chance of saving them. They were always glad to find there was a priest among the staff. Often it was the first question they would ask on being lifted out of the ambulance. Even those who professed to no religion seemed comforted by the idea. He went by the title of “Monsieur le Prêtre:” Joan never learned his name. It was he who had laid out the little cemetery on the opposite side of the village street. It had once been an orchard, and some of the trees were still standing. In the centre, rising out of a pile of rockwork, he had placed a crucifix that had been found upon the roadside and had surrounded it with flowers. It formed the one bright spot of colour in the village; and at night time, when all other sounds were hushed, the iron wreaths upon its little crosses, swaying against one another in the wind, would make a low, clear, tinkling music. Joan would sometimes lie awake listening to it. In some way she could not explain it always brought the thought of children to her mind.