But Marta did not want safety. Danger was sweet; it was expiation. She was helping, actually helping; that was enough. She envied the peaceful dead--they had no nightmares--as she aided the doctors in separating the bodies that were still breathing from those that were not; and she steeled herself against every ghastly sight save one, that of a man lying with his legs pinned under a wagon body. His jaw had been shot away. Slowly he was bleeding to death, but he did not realize it. He realized nothing in his delirium except the nature of his wound. He was dipping his finger in the cavity and, dab by dab, writing "Kill me!" on the wagon body. It sent reeling waves of red before her eyes. Then a shell burst near her and a doctor cried out: "She's hit!" But Marta did not hear him. She heard only the dreadful crack of the splitting shrapnel jacket. She had a sense of falling, and that was all. The next that she knew she was in a long chair on the veranda and the vague shadows bending over her gradually identified themselves as her mother and Minna. "I remember when you were telling of the last war that you didn't swoon at the sight of the wounded, mother," Marta whispered. "But I was not wounded," replied Mrs Galland. Marta ceased to be only a consciousness swimming in a haze. With the return of her faculties, she noticed that both her mother and Minna were looking significantly at her forearm; so she looked at it, too. It was bandaged. "A cut from a shrapnel fragment," said a doctor. "Not deep," he added. "Do I get an iron cross?" she asked, smiling faintly. It was rather pleasant to be alive. "All the crosses--iron and bronze and silver and gold!" he replied. "You forgot platinum," she said almost playfully, as she found nerves, muscles, and bones intact after that drop over a precipice into a black chasm. It was like the Marta of the days before she had undertaken to reform all creation, her mother was thinking. "Did I help any?" she asked seriously. "Well, I should say so!" declared the doctor. "I should say so!" he repeated. "You did the whole business down there by the gate." "Yes, the whole business! I brought it all on--all! I--" She flung a wild gesture at the landscape and then buried her face in her hands. "Yes, I did the whole business I--I played, smiled, lied! That awful sight--and he might not have been writing 'kill me' if I--" The doctor grasped her shoulders to keep her from rising. He spoke the first soothing words that came to mind. There was another shudder, an effort at control, and her hands dropped and she was looking up with a dull steadiness. "I'm not going mad!" she exclaimed. "What happened to--to that man who was pleading for death? Did any one who had been engaged in killing men who wanted to live kill the one who wanted to die?" "The shell burst that wounded you finished him," said the doctor.