"So much the better. The Germans won't see us." With that
consolatory remark he unlocked the door leading into the yard,
and walked out.

The surgeon lifted the canvas screen and called into the kitchen:

"Miss Merrick, have you time to take a little rest?"

"Plenty of time," answered a soft voice with an underlying
melancholy in it, plainly distinguishable though it had only
spoken three words.

"Come in, then," continued the surgeon, "and bring the English
lady with you. Here is a quiet room all to yourselves."

He held back the canvas, and the two women appeared.

The nurse led the way--tall, lithe, graceful--attired in her
uniform dress of neat black stuff, with plain linen collar and
cuffs, and with the scarlet cross of the Geneva Convention
embroidered on her left shoulder. Pale and sad, her expression
and manner both eloquently suggestive of suppressed suffering and
sorrow, there was an innate nobility in the carriage of this
woman's head, an innate grandeur in the gaze of her large gray
eyes and in the lines of her finely proportioned face, which made
her irresistibly striking and beautiful, seen under any
circumstances and clad in any dress. Her companion, darker in
complexion and smaller in stature, possessed attractions which
were quite marked enough to account for the surgeon's polite
anxiety to shelter her in the captain's room. The common consent