Corporal Duplessis lay, waxen, starry-eyed, as the American Sister came back into the ward. His look was on her as she entered the far-away door, and he saw the box in her arms. The girl knelt and drew out the gorgeous plaything and stood it by the side of the still, bandaged figure. An expression as of amazed radiance came into the fast-dimming eyes--into those large, brown, childlike eyes which had seen so little of the gorgeousness of earth. His hand stirred a very little--enough, for Evelyn quickly moved the gleaming satin train of the doll under the groping fingers. The eyes lifted to Evelyn's face and the smile in them was that of a prisoner who suddenly sees the gate of his prison opened and the fields of home beyond. It mattered little, one may believe, to the welcoming hosts of heaven that the angel at the gate of release for the child-soul of Corporal Duplessis, the poilu, was only Robina's doll! DUNDONALD'S DESTROYER This is the year 1977. It will be objected that the episode I am going to tell, having happened in 1917, having been witnessed by twenty-odd thousand people, must have been, if true, for sixty years common property and an old tale. But when General Cochrane--who saved England at the end of the great war--told me the Kitchener incident of the story last year, sitting in the rose-garden of the White Hart Inn at Sonning-on-Thames, I had never heard of it. I wonder why he told me. Probably, as is the case in most things which most people do, from a mixture of impulses. For one thing I am an American girl, with a fresher zest to hear tales of those titanic days than the people or the children of the people who lived through them. Also the great war of 1914 has stirred me since I was old enough to know about it, and I have read everything concerning it which I could lay hands on, and talked to everyone who had knowledge of it. Also, General Cochrane and I made friends from the first minute. I was a quite unimportant person of twenty-four years, he a magnificent hero of eighty, one of the proud figures of England; it made me a bit dizzy when I saw that he liked me. One feels, once in a long time, an unmistakable double pull, and knows that oneself and another are friends, and not age, color, race nor previous condition of servitude makes the slightest difference. To have that happen with a celebrity, a celebrity whom it would have been honor enough simply to meet, is quite dizzying. This was the way of it. I was staying with my cousin Mildred Ward, an Atlanta girl who married Sir Cecil Ward, an English baronet of Oxfordshire. I reached Martin-Goring on a day in July just in time to dress for dinner. When I came down, a bit early, Milly looked me over and pronounced favorably. "You're not so hard to look at," she pronounced. "It takes an American really to wear French clothes. I'm glad you're looking well tonight, because one of your heroes--Oh!"