They backed in accordingly and picked up two maimed men and a remarkably cheerful subaltern with his left arm in a sling and a bandage across one eye. As they passed out, Keith offered to return for another load; and, to Helen’s disgust, the offer was politely declined. By the time they reached the field hospital—a collection of marquees, fitted up with electric light—it was nearly ten o’clock. ‘Quite early; but as we don’t seem to be _wanted_, I suppose we must go to bed,’ Helen remarked with doleful emphasis, as they re-settled the car. ‘I feel distinctly snubbed. Four out of three hundred! What’s that?’ ‘A beginning—and no bad one!’ Keith answered placidly, filling his pipe. ‘Fanshawe says if we report ourselves at Boulogne we shall get all the work we want. There’s heavy fighting on the north—a big battle developing for Ypres and Calais.’ To Boulogne they returned accordingly, and had no cause this time to feel either snubbed or superfluous. There was still a famine of cars at the Base and the wounded were arriving in thousands: their bodies mangled and mutilated; their spirits, in the main, unquenched. Macnair and his party drove up to their hotel at noon, and their greeting from the Red Cross Authority was very much to the point. ‘All available cars wanted immediately at the Gare Maritime. Better get some lunch first.’ That lunch was of the briefest. Keith dumped their luggage in the hall without so much as asking if there were rooms to be had. Helen did not even open the coveted letter from Mark till they were back in the motor, speeding towards the bare unsheltered gare, where impromptu and comfortless hospital trains disgorged their tragic loads. Mercifully the sun of that miraculous autumn still shone unclouded; and, by the time autumn gave place to the wettest winter in decades, better arrangements had been made. All that afternoon they worked unceasingly, and late into the night. Back and forth, back and forth between station and hospital, jolting inevitably over railway lines, and a strip of merciless cobble pavement that, for men with shattered limbs, hurriedly dressed, involved several minutes of excruciating agony. ‘Keith, couldn’t they possibly take up that cruel bit of _pavé_?’ Helen pleaded after their seventh journey with three men at death’s door. ‘Even a raw road would be better than those stones.’ ‘I’ll move heaven and earth to get it improved,’ he assured her, little guessing that he had pledged himself to a labour of Hercules. * * * * * By the time they could take breath and think about finding beds, they were all dead weary, sustained only by the knowledge that they had given their mite of service to the utmost of their power. In Mark’s letter, which Helen had scarcely found time to read, there was a sentence on this head that had haunted her brain throughout those strenuous hours.