Mrs. Dalziel and Milly came and pleaded with me after that, and tried to frighten me into going with them; but, as Milly burst out desperately at last, I was "as hard as nails." Tony had told them nothing, I found, about the failure of our experiment or the identity of Monsieur Mars. I well understood why, and was grateful--grateful for that and for many things; most of all for bringing me to Belgium, and neither grudging nor regretting what he had done. So, as a lover, Tony went out of my life; but as a friend, he never can go. I had no time to cry or feel lonely, or tell myself what a beast I'd been, after the three had reluctantly left me to my fate; for when I went back on duty after the good-byes, it was to find that I had been sent for to hasten to the principal ward. Monsieur Mars was being delirious in English, and the doctors and nurses understood too little of the language to know whether he were merely babbling or pouring forth important information. There Eagle lay in his narrow, white bed, clean and pale, with his head swathed in bandages, a very different man from the grimy, bloodstained vision that had flashed on me a few hours before. The merest stranger who had ever seen Captain March would have deserved no credit for recognizing him now. The nurses waited eagerly for me to translate his mutterings; but he only mumbled again and again, "It's all over, all over!" If I could guess at a sad hidden meaning for the words, it was one which need not be handed on to others; and I proved so broken a reed as a translator that I expected to receive marching orders, right-about face. Strange to say, however, though his eyes were half closed and he seemed to see nothing, know nothing that went on around him, after I had spoken in a low tone to his nurse Eagle stopped muttering. For a moment he appeared to listen, and then with a deep sigh as if of relief from pain or some heavy anxiety, the half-open eyelids closed. The slight frown which had drawn his brows together slowly faded away. He had the air of being at rest. "One would almost fancy," said the head nurse, who had been watching the scene, speaking thoughtfully when she had beckoned me away from the bedside, "that this brave monsieur recognized your voice, Mademoiselle." Then I took heart of grace and did what I had told Tony I meant to do. I said that I had met Monsieur Mars in England and America. I had recognized him at once when the Red Cross men brought him into the hospital, but I had said nothing of this at the time, because I had felt that it would be considered unimportant.