er
eyes, and, stooping, kissed the cold, quiet lips.

There had been whispered talk among the men, and when she rose the one
who had first spoken to her came forward. He was nervous and stood
stiffly.

"Beg pardon, nurse," he said, "but we've sent for a stretcher, as the
police don't seem in any hurry. Would you like us to take him. Or would
it upset him, do you think, if he knew?"

"Thank you," she answered. "He would think it kind of you, I know."

She had the feeling that he was being borne by comrades.

CHAPTER XVII

It was from a small operating hospital in a village of the Argonne that
she first saw the war with her own eyes.

Her father had wished her to go. Arthur's death had stirred in him the
old Puritan blood with its record of long battle for liberty of
conscience. If war claimed to be master of a man's soul, then the new
warfare must be against war. He remembered the saying of a Frenchwoman
who had been through the Franco-Prussian war. Joan, on her return from
Paris some years before, had told him of her, repeating her words: "But,
of course, it would not do to tell the truth," the old lady had said, "or
we should have our children growing up to hate war."

"I'll be lonely and anxious till you come back," he said. "But that will
have to be my part of the fight."

She had written to Folk. No female nurses were supposed to be allowed
within the battle zone; but under pressure of shortage the French staff
were relaxing the rule, and Folk had pledged himself to her discretion.
"I am not doing you any kindness," he had written. "You will have to
share the common hardships and privations, and the danger is real. If I
didn't feel instinctively that underneath your mask of sweet
reasonableness you are one of the most obstinate young women God ever
made, and that without me you would probably get yourself into a still
worse hole, I'd have refused." And then followed a list of the things
she was to be sure to take with her, including a pound or two of
Keating's insect powder, and a hint that it might save her trouble, if
she had her hair cut short.

There was but one other woman at the hospital. It had been a farmhouse.
The man and both sons had been killed during the first year of the war,
and the woman had asked to be allowed to stay on. Her name was Madame
Lelanne. She was useful by reason of her great physical strength. She
could take up a man as he lay and carry him on her ou