“One little tug, for old times’ sake,” said the girl, and Brand yelped with pretended pain at the vigour of her pull, while all the nuns screamed with delight. Then a clock struck and the Reverend Mother touched Eileen (as afterwards I called her) on the arm and said she would leave her with her friends. One by one the nuns bowed to us, all smiling under their white _bandeaux_, and then went down the corridor through an open door which led into a chapel, as we could see by twinkling candlelight. Presently the music of an organ and of women’s voices came through the closed doors. Eileen O’Connor took us into a little parlour where there were just four rush-chairs and a table, and on the clean whitewashed walls a crucifix. Brand took a chair by the table, rather awkwardly, I thought. “How gay they are!” he said. “They do not seem to have been touched by the horrors of war.” “It is the gaiety of faith,” said Eileen. “How else could they have survived the work they have done, the things they have seen? This convent was a shambles for more than three years. These rooms were filled with wounded, German wounded, and often English wounded, who were prisoners. They were the worst cases for amputation, and butcher’s work, and the nuns did all the nursing. They know all there is to know of suffering and death.” “Yet they have not forgotten how to laugh!” said Brand. “That is wonderful. It is a mystery to me.” “You must have seen bad things,” said Eileen. “Have you lost the gift of laughter?” “Almost,” said Brand, “and once for a long time.” Eileen put her hands to her breast. “Oh, learn it again,” she said. “If we cannot laugh we cannot work. Why, I owe my life to a sense of humour.” She spoke the last words with more than a trivial meaning. They seemed to tell of some singular episode, and Brand asked her to explain. She did not explain then. She only said some vague things about laughing herself out of prison and stopping a German bullet with a smile. “Why did the devils put you in prison?” asked Brand. She shrugged her shoulders. “In Lille it was bad form if one had not been arrested once at least. I was three weeks in a cell half the size of this, and twenty women were with me there. There was very little elbow-room!” She proved her sense of humour then by that deep-throated laugh of hers, but I noticed that just for a second behind the smile in her eyes there crept a shadow as at the remembrance of some horror, and that she shivered a little, as though some coldness had touched her. “It must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” said Brand, measuring the space with his eyes. “Twenty women herded in a room like that!” “With me for twenty-one,” said Eileen. “We had no means of washing.” She used an awful phrase. “We were a living stench.” “Good God!” said Brand. Eileen O’Connor waved back the remembrance. “Tell me of England and of Ireland. How’s the little green isle? Has it done well in the war?”