“It would be rather interesting, a fight between them,” said Joan. “Myself I should back Phillips.” “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.”!

How long Joan remained there she was never quite sure. There was little difference between day and night. After it had been quiet for an hour or so, Madame Lelanne would go out, to return a little later with a wounded man upon her back; and when one died, she would throw him across her shoulder and disappear again up the steps. Sometimes it was a Frenchman and sometimes a German she brought in. One gathered that the fight for the village still continued. There was but little they could do for them beyond dressing their wounds and easing their pain. Joan and the little chemist took it in turns to relieve one another. If Madame Lelanne ever slept, it was when she would sit in the shadow behind the stove, her hands upon her knees. Dubos had been in the house when it had fallen. Madame Lelanne had discovered him pinned against a wall underneath a great oak beam that had withstood the falling débris. His beard had been burnt off, but otherwise he had been unharmed. “Yes,” answered Joan. “He was a landscape painter, wasn’t he?”

“No, it wasn’t,” answered the child. “Most of them were against it. And then there was Mama,” she added in a lower tone. Joan promised, and the child went out. She looked pretty when she smiled. She closed the door behind her noiselessly. “God knows I didn’t want it, speaking personally,” said a German prisoner one day, with a laugh. “I had been working at a printing business sixteen hours a day for seven years. It was just beginning to pay me, and now my wife writes me that she has had to shut the place up and sell the machinery to keep them all from starving.”