After he had finished with the last of the row of men, he stopped in the act of drying his hands and looked quizzically at her. He remembered that yesterday and the day before he had seen in this girl's eyes a peculiar, strained, listening look, as though she were trying to see something or maybe hear something outside the range of ordinary senses. He had seen that the girl had been laboring under some terrifying anxiety, but, as it had not affected the mechanical perfection of her work, and certainly was not connected with the work, he had said nothing. Now as he saw the quiet loveliness of some assured happiness in her face, he said: "Young lady, what wonderful thing have you been seeing, since yesterday?" Augusta looked up at him in startled wonder, but she did not evade or ask him what he meant. She told him the simple truth, so that he might make what he would of it. "It isn't anything that I've _seen_. It's just something that I _know_." "Um-hum," agreed the doctor cordially. "Very satisfactory, I'm sure. And very illuminating." He turned and went out of the ward door into the sunshine of the hot afternoon. Crossing the wide open court where the great red cross was painted on the hard whitewashed surface of the ground, he reflected that, whereas most women would have smiled and evaded and offered some subterfuge and he could then have guessed the facts to a practical certainty, this girl had probably spoken the precise truth--leaving him exactly as wise as he had been before asking. Augusta, walking slowly back to the head of the line, wondered, smiling, just what the doctor would have said if she had really told him what she meant. She had spoken the literal truth, but it was very far from being what he would have thought truth. Two days before she had caught a glimpse of Jimmie Wardwell lying with his head thrown back against a bank of stones and earth. And she had seen a great, gaping wound at the base of his throat where his shirt had been torn open. It was but an instant flash of vision that had come to her while she was in the act of writing a letter for a wounded man. The man had stopped for a moment, waiting to think of the next thing to be said in the letter. And while she sat waiting with her writing hand suspended over the paper she had looked straight at the dirty, streaked side of a ravine, and there was Jimmie lying there with a trace of a tired but triumphant little laugh on his face. Even in the instant she was sure that she saw him tremble and quiver back against the bank, as though death were striking. Then the voice of the man on the cot beside her went on slowly--the letter was to his younger brother at home: "Tell Mom not to bother any more with sweaters, we'll all be home for Christmas anyway." Augusta's poised hand fell mechanically to the paper and began to write.