The driver of the last ambulance seemed to be ill; his head lay on the shoulder of a Sister of Charity who had taken the steering wheel. The gendarme beside Maryette signalled her to stop; then he got out of the market cart and, lifting the body of the American muleteer in his powerful arms, strode across the road. The airman leaped from the market cart and followed him. Between them they drew out a stretcher, laid the muleteer on it, and shoved it back into the vehicle. There was a brief consultation, then they both came back to Maryette, who, rigid in her seat and very pale, sat watching the procedure in silence. The gendarme said: "I go to Fontanes. There’s a dressing station on the road. It appears that your young man’s heart hasn’t quite stopped yet----" The girl rose excitedly to her feet, but the gendarme gently forced her back into her seat and laid the reins in her hands. To the airman he growled: "I did not tell this poor child to hope; I merely informed her that her friend yonder is still breathing. But he’s as full of holes as a pepper pot!" He frowned at Maryette: "_Allons!_ My comrade here goes to Sainte Lesse. Drive him there now, in God’s name, before the Uhlans come clattering on your heels!" He turned, strode away to the ambulance once more, climbed in, and placed one big arm around the sick driver’s shoulder, drawing the man’s head down against his breast. "_Bonne chance!_" he called back to the airman, who had now seated himself beside Maryette. "Explain to our little bell-mistress that we’re taking her friend to a place where they fool Death every day--where to cheat the grave is a flourishing business! Good-bye! Courage! En route, brave Sister of the World!" The Sister of Charity turned and smiled at Maryette, made her a friendly gesture, threw in the clutch, and, twisting the steering wheel with both sun-browned hands, guided the machine out onto the road and sped away swiftly after the cloud of receding dust. "Drive on, mademoiselle," said the airman quietly. In his accent there was something poignantly familiar to Maryette, and she turned with a start and looked at him out of her dark blue, tear-marred eyes. "Are _you_ also American?" she asked. "Gunner observer, American air squadron, mademoiselle." "An airman?" "Yes. My machine was shot down in Nivelle woods an hour ago." After a silence, as they jogged along between the hazel thickets in the warm afternoon sunshine: "Were you acquainted with my friend?" she asked wistfully. "With Jack Burley? A little. I knew him in Calais." The tears welled up into her eyes: "Could you tell me about him?... He was my first friend.... I did not understand him in the beginning, monsieur. Among children it is different; I had known boys--as one knows them at school. But a man, never--and, indeed, I had not thought I had grown up until--he came--Djack--to live at our inn.... The White Doe at Sainte Lesse, monsieur. My father keeps it."