are you? There's a regulation against
this sort of thing."

"We are welfare workers," Tish said calmly. "Behind us there stand the
entire American people. If kept from the front trenches while trying to
serve our boys there are ways of informing the people through the
press."

"It's exactly the press I fear," he said in a sad voice. "Think of the
results to you three, and to me."

"What results?" Tish demanded impatiently. "I'm not doing anything I'm
ashamed of."

He was abstractedly moving the cribbage pins about.

"It's like this," he said: "Not very far behind the lines there are a
lot of newspaper correspondents, and lately there hasn't been much news.
But perhaps I'd better explain my own position. I am engaged to a lovely
girl at home. I write to her every day, but I have been conscious
recently that in her replies to me there has been an element of--shall I
say suspicion? No, that is not the word. Anxiety--of anxiety, lest I
shall fall in love with some charming Red Cross or Y. M. C. A. girl.
Nothing could be further from my thoughts, but you can see my situation.
Three feminine visitors at nightfall; news-hungry correspondents; all
the rest of it. Scandal, dear ladies! And absolute ruin to my hopes!"

"Bosh!" said Tish. But I could see that she was uncomfortable. "If
there's trouble I'll send her our birth certificates. Besides, I thought
you said the general was your brother-in-law?"

Aggie says he changed color at that but he said hastily: "By marriage,
madam, only by marriage. By that I mean--I--he--the general is married
to my brother."

"Really!" said Tish. "How unusual!"

She said afterward that she saw at once then that we were only wasting
time, and that neither one of them would move hand or foot to get
Charlie Sands back. Aggie had been scraping her skirt with a table
knife, and was now fairly tidy, so Tish prepared to depart.

"On thinking it over," she said, "I realize that I am confronting a
situation which requires brains rather than brute force. I shall
therefore attend to it myself. Good night, colonel. I hope you find
another duckboard. And--if you are writing home present my compliments
to the general's husband. Come, Aggie."

At the top of the incline I looked back. The colonel was staring after
us and wiping his forehead with a khaki handkerchief.

"You see," Tish said bitterly, "that is the sort of help one gets from
the Army." She drew a deep breath and looked in the general