A month in bed brought me the period when I was declared out of danger, and was allowed to sit up in a chair near a window overlooking a little garden bright with hollyhocks and sunflowers. Then came the day when, leaning on the arm of Sister Madeleine--the name under which, she said, I was to know her--I took my first walk and descended into that garden, to lie there for the best hours of the day on a _chaise longue_, conversing with her, or, when she was occupied with other wounded, reading and reflecting. It was Sister Madeleine who told me of passing events. But, oh! how discreetly she broke the news of the triumphant march of the German armies southward to Dinant and westward to Maubeuge! It required no great psychological insight on my part to detect where her sympathies lay. Her looks when, the wind being favourable, the faint sound of cannon reached us, the tone of her voice when France was named, her significant reticence on certain occasions, told me much more than actual words. One of these occasions stands out in my mind with particular prominence, owing to my having read in her words a warning, and conceived for the first time the idea of escape. "The Herr Doktor is immensely pleased with the progress you are making, Captain X----," said Sister Madeleine, rising from my side to pluck some Michaelmas daisies from an adjoining border. "He says you may be allowed soon to take a little gentle exercise in the garden, and do a little gardening, too, if you are a flower-lover, as I doubt not. Are you inclined that way?" "I shall be delighted to turn my hand to weeding and planting," I replied. "The garden indeed needs attention!" "_N'est ce pas?_ Poor Jean, our gardener, now with the French colours, would be heartbroken if only he could see the wilderness his little earthly paradise has become. How grateful he will be to you when he returns--if he ever should return after this dreadful war--and finds that someone has been tending his beloved chrysanthemums and dahlias. When the mobilization order reached him he was in the midst of potting slips of geranium in the tool and potting shed yonder"--motioning to a little wooden construction at the end of the garden--"and everything there is just as he left it. A heap of withered slips lies side by side with rows of empty flower-pots, whilst in a corner I saw his working-clothes, which he hastily changed before he came to the house to wish us good-bye and passed into the unknown." "I must try to prove myself to be a worthy successor to the brave fellow," I said. "Don't you think, Sister Madeleine, that in one respect--my unkempt appearance--I shall not make a bad substitute?" Walking back to me with her bouquet, she gave me a critical look and laughed. Certainly, no one at home would have recognized me as I now was, with my long beard and moustache and uncut hair. All at once her face became serious, and, without replying to my question, she said:--