For answer she had rolled up her sleeve, and let them examine her arm. And then, in her turn, had insisted on rolling up his sleeve, revealing the fact that his arms above the wrists had evidently not too recently been washed; and the episode had ended in laughter and a babel of shrill voices. And, at once, they were a party of chums, discussing matters together. The years that followed—till, like some shipwrecked swimmer to whom returning light reveals the land, she felt new life and hopes come back to her—always remained in her memory vague, confused; a jumble of events, thoughts, feelings, without sequence or connection.!

“Why not?” she continued, with a flash of defiance, though Madge had not spoken. “It is a weapon like any other—knowledge, intellect, courage. God has given me beauty. I shall use it in His service.” It was from a small operating hospital in a village of the Argonne that she first saw the war with her own eyes.

The question troubled her. It struck her with a pang of self-reproach that she had always been indifferent to her mother’s illness, regarding it as more or less imaginary. “It was mental rather than physical, I think,” she answered. “I never knew what brought it about.” “Are they yours?” she asked. She had never connected them with the works, some half a mile away. Though had she been curious, she might have learnt that they were known as “Allway’s Folly.” He knew the thief, the grandchild of an old bedridden dame who lived some miles away on the edge of the moor. The old man stood long, watching the small cloaked figure till it was lost in the darkness. It was not till he lay upon his dying bed that he confessed it. But each evening, from that day, he would steal into the room and see to it himself that the window was left ajar.