ing good-bye, "you and your staff are going to be wiped out, if you
keep on running your motors into excitement."

The Doctor smiled. It was doubtful if he heard the man.

One day, the Doctor got hold of Smith, a London boy driver, and Hilda,
and said:

"I think we would better visit Dixmude, this morning. It sounds like
guns in that direction. That means work for us. Get your hat, my dear."

"But I never wear a hat," she said with a touch of irritation.

"Ah, I hadn't noticed," returned the Doctor, and he hadn't. Hilda went
free and fair those days, with uncovered head. Where the men went, there
went she. For the modern woman has put aside fear along with the other
impediments. The Doctor and Hilda, and, lastly, Smith, climbed aboard
and started at fair speed.

Smith's motor-ambulance was a swift machine, canopied by a brown hood,
the color of a Mediterranean sail, with red crosses on the sides to ward
off shells, and a huge red cross on the top to claim immunity from
aeroplanes with bombs and plumbed arrows.

"Make haste, make haste," urged Dr. McDonnell, who felt all time was
wasted that was not spent where the air was thick. They had ridden for a
half hour.

"There are limits, sir," replied Smith. "If you will look at that piece
of road ahead, sir, you will see that it's been chewed up with Jack
Johnsons. It's hard on the machine."

But the Doctor's attention was already far away, for he had been seized
with the beauty of the fresh spring morning. There was a tang in the
air, and sense of awakening life in the ground, which not all the
bleakness of the wasted farms and the dead bodies of cattle could
obscure for him.

"Isn't that pretty," he observed, as a shrapnel exploded overhead in the
blue with that ping with which it breaks its casing and releases the
pattering bullets. It unfolded itself in a little white cloud, which
hung motionless for an instant before the winds of the morning shredded
it.

To Hilda the sensation of being under fire was always exhilarating. The
thought of personal peril never entered her head. The verse of a
favorite gypsy song often came into her memory these days:--

"I am breath, dew, all resources.
Laughing in your face, I cry
Would ye kill me, save your forces.
Why kill me, who cannot die."

They swept on to Oudekappele and its stout stone church, where lonely in
the tower, the watcher, leaning earthward, told off his observations of
the enemy to