She looked at me and hesitated; but my imploring eyes, which suddenly spouted tears, decided her kind heart in my favour. "One glance, then; but control yourself," she said. And taking me round the waist, she led me quickly across the room. "Mademoiselle, our young British assistant thinks she knows the patient," the matron announced. "Make way for her, an instant. Then she will go to her own ward." Some one pushed me forward, at the same time holding me firmly lest I should collapse. One fleeting glance was vouchsafed me of a form covered with a sheet, and a blackened, blood-smeared face, with half-closed eyes whose whites showed under the lids, and on whose lips was some strange semblance of a happy smile. To those who did not know him well, or love him beyond all the world, that marred face might have been unrecognizable in its mask of dirt and blood. But nothing could disguise it from me. Monsieur Mars, the wounded hero of Liege, and Captain Eagle March, late of the American army, were one and the same. * * * * * I didn't faint, but I don't remember anything else till I found myself sitting on a chair in my own ward. The nurses were having morning coffee. One of them gave me a cup. If I hadn't been a nurse myself, with patients to think of, I should have dropped it and burst out crying. But instead, I drank the coffee; and a moment later went back to the bedside of the man I had been tending before leave was granted me to see Tony. "You look as if you'd met the ghost of some one you love," said the nurse who had been keeping my place. But he was not a ghost. Not yet--not yet! CHAPTER XIX Tidings of the new hero of Liege floated up to our ward within the hour. There was slight concussion of the brain; there were scalp wounds which had had to be stitched up; and there were many bruises; but the surgeons reported no bones broken, and complete recovery only a matter of days. Even the monoplane itself, we heard, was singularly little damaged. All this would have appeared miraculous, and the pious Belgians would have attributed it to direct intervention of the Blessed Virgin, had not the wrecked dirigible on examination told a silent story of the air scout's cleverness as well as his daring. Before swooping on the Zeppelin from above, he had apparently discharged bombs of his own on the balloon, which had burst before the monoplane dashed down on to it, and the great bulk had fallen away from under, without carrying the lighter machine to destruction. The theory which awaited corroboration from the aviator was that he had begun to plane down, despite some damage, and had actually fallen but a short distance, striking earth a hundred yards away from the wrecked dirigible.