“Tell me,” she said, “what interfered with it?” Unconsciously she was leaning forward, her chin supported by her hands. Their faces were very near to one another. “Yes,” said Joan. “We are founding the League of Youth. You’ve got to be in it. We are going to establish branches all round the world.”!

“Is he brainy?” he whispered after a minute. Joan went back by the early train. She met some people at the station that she knew and travelled up with them. That picture of Mrs. Phillips’s tongue just showing beyond the line of Mrs. Phillips’s cheek remained at the back of her mind; but it was not until she was alone in her own rooms that she dared let her thoughts return to it.

“Isn’t it rather dangerous work?” she asked. She felt it was a footling question even as she asked it. Her brain had become stodgy. “I always come prepared to these scrimmages,” she explained. “I’ve got some Hazeline in my bag. They haven’t kicked you, have they?” “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.