“I wonder if you’re right,” mused Mrs. Phillips. “He does often say that he’d just as soon I didn’t talk about them.” She thought it ended. But yet she sat there motionless.!

She paused with the door in her hand, and a faint smile played round the thin red lips. Flossie’s young man was whisked away. Joan, who had seated herself in a small chair, was alone for a few minutes.

She had written to Folk. No female nurses were supposed to be allowed within the battle zone; but under pressure of shortage the French staff were relaxing the rule, and Folk had pledged himself to her discretion. “I am not doing you any kindness,” he had written. “You will have to share the common hardships and privations, and the danger is real. If I didn’t feel instinctively that underneath your mask of sweet reasonableness you are one of the most obstinate young women God ever made, and that without me you would probably get yourself into a still worse hole, I’d have refused.” And then followed a list of the things she was to be sure to take with her, including a pound or two of Keating’s insect powder, and a hint that it might save her trouble, if she had her hair cut short. Suddenly, while speaking, she fell into a passionate fit of weeping. She went on through her tears: “A baby,” she said. “Oh, it was my own fault,” she continued. “I wanted it. It was all the talk at the time. You don’t remember. Our right to children. No woman complete without one. Maternity, woman’s kingdom. All that sort of thing. As if the storks brought them. Don’t suppose it made any real difference; but it just helped me to pretend that it was something pretty and high-class. ‘Overmastering passion’ used to be the explanation, before that. I guess it’s all much of a muchness: just natural instinct.”