For the next half-hour, with nerves keyed to their utmost and hands working with the greatest speed and skill they were capable of, Sheila O'Leary's soul went down into purgatory and stayed there. Not once did she look beyond the boy she was helping to save; not once did she let herself think what might be happening beyond the circle of light that hemmed them in. With all the woman courage she could muster, she was stifling every breath of love or longing--or self-pity. If she could have killed her body and known that when that night's work was done she would be laid in the cemetery outside with Peter, she would have been almost satisfied. Suddenly she realized they had finished. The chief was repeating something over and over again. "The boy is safe. You'd better lie down." The bearers were moving the boy back to the pews and the chief was leading her down the steps of the chancel. But it was Sheila who guided their steps at the bottom. She led the way toward the German and the thing he had been asked to watch. Terror shook her. It seemed as if she could never look at what she knew would be waiting for her, and yet no power on earth could have held her back. As she reached the prisoner she saw in bewilderment a strange scattering of things on the floor about him--forceps, some knives, a roll of gauze, and a syringe. There was an odor of a strange antiseptic which made her faint. She tottered and would have fallen had the German not helped the chief to steady her. "He has not gained consciousness, madam. He has lost too much blood for that." The German spoke in English. He also spread his hands in mute apology for what he had done. "I have stanched his wounds with what poor supplies I had with me. It has merely kept him alive. He will require more care, better dressing." No one answered. Words seemed the most impossible and absurd means of expression just then. The German smiled at the look Sheila gave him, and the smile was arrogant. "You Americans have always made such a fuss over what you have been pleased to call our brutalities. What is war if it isn't a consistent effort to exterminate the enemy? The women are the wives of the enemy and the breeders of more; the wounded are still the enemy--if they recover, they fight again. But a German knows how to honor a brave act. And when you go back, madam, you can tell how Carl Tiefmann, a German surgeon, wounded and taken prisoner, so far forgot his Prussian creed as to spare an enemy for a brave woman." He bowed and went back to the church doors. Sheila watched him go through a trailing of mist; then she dropped through the chief's arms, unconscious, on the floor beside Peter's stretcher.