And the Commandant has brought four women with him besides me. I confess I was appalled when I first knew that they would be brought. Mrs. Torrence, perhaps--for she is in love with danger,[1] and she is of the kind whom no power, military or otherwise, can keep back from their desired destiny. But why little Janet McNeil?[2] She is the youngest of us, an eighteen-year-old child who has followed Mrs. Torrence, and will follow her if she walks straight into the German trenches. She sits beside me on my right, ready for anything, all her delicate Highland beauty bundled up in the kit of a little Arctic explorer, utterly determined, utterly impassive. Her small face, under the woolly cap that defies the North Pole, is nearly always grave; but it has a sudden smile that is adorable. And the youngest but one, Ursula Dearmer, who can't be so much older--Mr. Riley's gloom and the Commandant's hinterland are nothing to the mystery of this young girl. She looks as if she were not yet perfectly awake, as if it would take considerably more than the siege-guns of Namur to rouse her. She moves about slowly, as if she were in no sort of hurry for the adventure. She has slow-moving eyes, with sleepy, drooping eyelids that blink at you. She has a rather sleepy, rather drooping nose. Her shoulders droop; her small head droops, slightly, half the time. If she were not so slender she would be rather like a pretty dormouse half-recovering from its torpor. You insist on the determination of her little thrust-out underlip, only to be contradicted by her gentle and delicately-retreating chin. In our committee-room, among a band of turbulent female volunteers, all clamouring for the firing-line, Ursula Dearmer, dressed very simply, rather like a senior school-girl, and accompanied by her mother, had a most engaging air of submission and docility. If anybody breaks out into bravura it will not be Ursula Dearmer. This thought consoles me when I think of the last solemn scenes in that committee-room and of the pledges, the frightfully sacred pledges, I gave to Ursula Dearmer's mother. As a result of this responsibility I see myself told off to the dreary duty of conducting Ursula Dearmer back to Dover at the moment when things begin to be really thick and thrilling. And I deplore the Commandant's indiscriminate hospitality to volunteers. Mrs. Lambert (she must surely be the next youngest) you can think of with less agitation, in spite of her youth, her charming eyes and the recklessly extravagant quantity of her golden hair. For she is an American citizen, and she has a husband (also an American citizen) in Ghent, and her husband has a high-speed motor-car, and if the Germans should ever advance upon this city he can be relied upon to take her out of it before they can possibly get in. Besides, even in the German lines American citizens are safe.