as actually using her wedding finery! And what an
easily upset person that man was! But everybody in the house seemed to
have nerves on edge. It was no wonder about Allan--he wanted his
mother, of course, poor boy! She felt, as she ran fleetly across the
long room that separated her sleeping quarters from her husband's, the
same mixture of pity and timidity that she had felt with him before.
Poor boy! Poor, silent, beautiful statue, with his one friend gone! She
opened the door and entered swiftly into his room.

She was not thinking about herself at all, only of how she could help
Allan, but there must have been something about her of the picture-book
angel to the pain-racked man, lying tensely at length in the room's
darkest corner. Her long, dully gold hair, loosening from its twist,
flew out about her, and her face was still flushed with sleep. There was
a something about her that was vividly alight and alive, perhaps the
light in her blue eyes.

From what the man had said Phyllis had thought Allan was delirious, but
she saw at once that he was only in severe pain, and talking more
disconnectedly, perhaps, than the slow-minded Englishman could follow.
He did not look like a statue now. His cheeks were burning with evident
pain, and his yellow-brown eyes, wide-open, and dilated to darkness,
stared straight out. His hands were clenching and unclenching, and his
head moved restlessly from side to side. Every nerve and muscle, she
could see, was taut.

"They're all dead," he muttered. "Father and Mother and Louise--and
I--only I'm not dead enough to bury. Oh, God, I wish I was!"

That wasn't delirium; it was something more like heart-break. Phyllis
moved closer to him, and dropped one of her sleep-warm hands on his
cold, clenched one.

"Oh, poor boy!" she said. "I'm so sorry--so sorry!" She closed her hands
tight over both his.

Some of her strong young vitality must have passed between them and
helped him, for almost immediately his tenseness relaxed a little, and
he looked at her.

"You--you're not a nurse," he said. "They go around--like--like
a--vault----"

She had caught his attention! That was a good deal, she felt. She
forgot everything about him, except that he was some one to be
comforted, and her charge. She sat down on the bed by him, still holding
tight to his hands.

"No, indeed," she said, bending nearer him, her long loose hair falling
forward about her resolutely-smiling young face. "Don't yo