ognition, and Sheila held out a
friendly hand.

"I am glad to see you again, Captain Fauchet; not much of a scratch, I
hope."

The eyes held their cunning, the sinister droop to the lips intensified as
they curved mockingly to greet her: "Bon! It is Ma'am'selle O'Leary. The
scratch it is nothing. Bertrand Fauchet has still the two good hands to
kill with." He curled them as if over the hilts of invisible weapons, and
with lightning thrusts attacked the air about him. "Une, deux, trois,
quatre, cinq--Ha-ha!" and the appalling pantomime ended with a diabolical
laugh.

In some inexplicable fashion he had come into full possession of his _nom
de guerre_. Sheila had thought her nerves steel, her control unshakable;
but she was shuddering when they reached the corridor. There she broke
through the orthodox repression of her calling and quizzed the chief.

"What's happened? He wasn't like that when I knew him. If it was
witch-times we'd say he'd been caught by the evil eye."

"Same thing, brought up to date. It's shell shock. Memory all right,
nerves and brain speeded up like a maniac; he's come back obsessed with
the idea he must kill. First night he was brought in, before we knew what
the matter was, he knifed the two Germans in his ward. Since then we've
kept him safe between these two Australians, but he has their nerves
almost shattered." The chief smiled grimly.

To Sheila it seemed diabolically logical. What was more natural in this
business of war than that when one's reason went over the top it should
grip the mad desire to kill? But the horror of it! She turned back to the
day's work white and sick at heart. For twenty-four hours she accepted it
as inevitable. At the end of that time her memory was harkening back to
the bashful boy of the French liner, the boy who could smile like a lost
cherub, who looked at her with the fineness of soul that made her
companionship a willing gift. Had that fine, simple part of him been blown
to eternity and could eternity alone bring it back? And what of the years
before him, the years such a physique was bound to claim? Did it mean a
mad-cell with a keeper?

At the end of a third day the old Leerie of the San was walking through
the wards of the hospital with her lamp trimmed and burning, casting such
a radiance on that eager face that the men turned in their cots to catch
the last look of her as she passed; and after she had gone blinked across
at one another as if to say: