We stepped into a little room with a kind of English look to it, and a
carbon print of the Sistine Madonna on the wall.

"Are they seriously wounded?" she asked.

"I cannot say."

A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a small,
beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of rubber boots,
and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into the room.

"Two wounded have arrived," said the lady. "You are to help these
messieurs get out the stretchers."

The porter looked out of the door at the tail-light of the ambulance,
glowing red behind its curtain of rain.

"Mon Dieu, what a deluge!" he exclaimed, and followed us forth. With an
"Easy there," and "Lift now," we soon had both of our clients out of the
ambulance and indoors. They lay on the floor of the odd, stiff, little
room, strange intruders of its primness; the first, a big, heavy,
stolid, young peasant with enormous, flat feet, and the second a small,
nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang and bright, uneasy eyes. The
mud-stained blue of the uniforms seemed very strange, indeed, beside the
Victorian furniture upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush. A middle-aged
servant--a big-boned, docile-looking kind of creature, probably the
porter's wife--entered, followed by two other women, the last two
wearing the same cut of prim black waist and skirt, and the same pattern
of white wristlets and collar. We then carried the two soldiers upstairs
to a back room, where the old servant had filled a kind of enamel