s. Waller, feeling that they might be a comfort to the
mother.

As she tramped back to the sanitarium, rather enjoying paddling through
the puddles and feeling the cold rain on her face, she heard the sound
of a motor. She stepped aside to let the army truck pass, but it slowed
up and stopped beside her. There was nobody but the chauffeur in the
car. He leaned from his seat and spoke to her in a gentle voice, with
an accent unmistakably southern with a soft slurring of the final g and
an almost imperceptible r--too subtle to be pronounced a dialect but
still decided enough to place the man below the Mason and Dixon line.

"I believe I am going your way and I shall be very glad to take you to
your destination," he said, saluting her. "It is a bad day to be
walking."

Josie was sorry to have her walk cut short but the man's courtesy was
not to be gainsaid. She climbed up on the seat by him, thanking him
frankly. She had seen him before, where, she could not remember.

"Are you in the army?" she asked.

"I suppose so," he answered whimsically.

"They tell me I am, but I can't remember ever getting in it. I can't
remember anything, in fact. I remember how to read and how to speak
French and some German and whenever I get hold of a book I have read
before the plot comes back to me if it happens to be a novel, but my
past life is a blank. If I could get some inkling of it I believe it
would come back like the plot of the novels. I am as well as can be
physically and the alienists say I am as sane as anyone, but I might
have been born yesterday, for all I know of my life before I became
conscious in a vile German prison camp.

"But I wonder why I tell you all this! It seems hardly fair to pick up
a young lady on the road and take advantage of her helplessness to pour
in her ear my own troubles."

"Oh, please, tell me! I am very much interested. Do you never have any
remembrance of your former existence? Do not odors or sounds or sights
bring some vague impression of yesterday?"

"Why--yes! Violets seem to mean more to me than other flowers. Why, I
don't know--but I have a feeling that someone I must have loved and who
loved me is in trouble. I can't get rid of the feeling. But if it is
so--if anyone does love me why doesn't he or she find me? I'm here--not
really lost. If I only could get some clue--a name--an address--
something, anything on which to build."

He turned and looked at Josie. She met his gaze with a