Then, before he saw her or heard her step, he knew that SHE had come. His heart quickened, and his breathing was tremulous with mingled emotions. 'Well,' she said, coming to his bedside and offering her hand, 'how is the invalid?' 'Elise,' he said, 'it is wonderful of you to come.' He looked at her khaki uniform, at the driver's cap which imprisoned her hair. 'Now,' he went on dreamily, 'it all comes back to me. It was you who brought me here.' 'Had you forgotten that already?' she said, bringing a chair to the bedside. 'I couldn't remember,' he answered weakly. 'All I know is that I was walking alone--and there came a blank. When I woke up I was here with a head that didn't feel quite like my own. But I knew, somehow, that you had been with me.' 'What does the doctor say about your wound?' 'It is not serious.' 'You have heard since what happened?' 'Yes.' 'It was absolutely topping the way you fought for that child's life.' He made a deprecatory gesture, and for a moment conversation ceased. He was wondering at her voice. A subtle change had come over it. Her words were just as uncomfortably rapid as in the first days of their friendship, but there was a hidden quality caught by his ear which he could not analyse. Looking at her with eyes that had waited so long for her coming, he felt once more the affinity she held with things of nature. Her presence obliterated everything else. They were alone--the two of them. The hospital, London, the world, were dimmed to a distant background. 'After such a night,' he said, 'it is very kind of you to make this effort.' 'Not at all. We're cousins, you know.' 'I--I don't'---- 'The Americans and the English, I mean. Relatives always go to each others' funerals, so I thought I might stretch a point and take in the hospital.' 'Oh! That was all?' 'Goodness, no! You automatically became a protege of mine when I picked you up last night. Isn't that a horrid expression?--but frightfully fashionable these unmoral days.' 'You must excuse me,' he said slowly, 'but I was foolish enough to think you came here because--well, because you wanted to.' 'So I did. An air-raid casualty is ever so much more romantic than a wounded soldier. If he lives through it, he always proposes the very next day either to the nurse or to the ambulance-driver, whereas a Tommy, after his third wound, becomes so _blase_.' 'You shouldn't torture me,' he said, wincing noticeably under the incision of her words. Just for a fleeting instant her eyes were softened with a tender look of self-reproach. His heart warmed at the sight, but before he could convince himself that it was not a creation of his own fancy, it had passed, and once more she was holding him at bay with her impersonal abruptness. 'Will you tell me about yourself?' he urged. 'Please.' 'What do you want to know?'