The big room which a week ago had been the restaurant of our prosperous hotel annex was still lit by electric lamps fantastically unsuited to a hospital ward: chandeliers of sprawling gilt branches decorated with metallic imitations of mistletoe. The light of day outside was filtering in but dimly, yet it paled and made ghastly the yellowish glow of electricity. Even the doctors and nurses with their tired faces looked like ghosts, and the wounded soldiers in their narrow white cots seemed figures of dead men modelled in wax. Some of them opened their eyes, in deep violet hollows; others kept the lids down, caring for or conscious of nothing. The staff who received the litter, and the Red Cross men who brought it, spoke in low voices, but never in irritating whispers. The moving feet made only a faint pattering sound on the linoleum-covered floor, and the litter was set down noiselessly at the side of the one free bed in the ward. Near it stood a screen which only a few hours ago had hidden the death agony of a soldier. I looked at this and shuddered, thinking once again, "_What if it were he!_" and if the screen should be needed again for the same purpose. Where I lurked, out of every one's way, yet close to the door, flat as a paper doll, against the wall which smelled of carbolic acid, nobody troubled about me. I was just one of the younger nurses, and none stopped to ask whether my place were there or upstairs in another ward. "Oh God, if it be he, let him live!" I heard my soul praying. Nurses leaned over the long dark form on the litter, whose face I could not see, because where I stood only the top of the head was visible, a head thickly covered with short rumpled hair, which might be blond or brown when the blood stains were washed off. The bending figures quickly, skilfully cut away the stained and blackened clothing, and when it was the surgeon's turn to examine and perhaps to operate, some one noticed the intruder. The head nurse came to me and laid a hand on my shoulder. "My child, it was you who brought us the word just now!" she said kindly, her eyes on my pallid face. "But you must go to your own duties. This is a great honour we have, to care for the hero who has saved us. It must be our turn to save him. Go tell the news in the upper wards, that we hope for the best, the very best. Say to the doctors that it is indeed Monsieur Mars. They will know the name. They will have heard of him, and what he did for Liege only the other day." "I'll go, but _one_ instant first, I implore you, nurse!" I pleaded. "I think--it may be--that Monsieur Mars is an old friend of mine. I beg you to let me have a glimpse of his face!"