Wetteren Hospital--brick walls and stone floors, the clatter of wooden shoes in the outer corridor, where peasants shuffled. In two inner rooms, where eleven cots stood, there was a hush, for there lay the grievously wounded. Eleven peasants they were, men, women, and a child. A priest was ministering cheer to them, bed by bed. Four Sisters were busy and noiseless in service. The priest led Hilda and Hinchcliffe to the cot of one of the men. The peasant's face was pallid, and the cheeks sunken from loss of blood. The priest addressed him in Flemish, telling him these two were friendly visitors, and wished to know what had been done to him. Quietly and sadly the man in the bed spoke. Sentence by sentence the priest translated it for Hilda and the banker. On Sunday morning, the peasant, Leopold de Man, of Number 90 Hovenier Straat, Alost, was hiding in the house of his sister, in the cellar. The Germans made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper room. Then catching sight of Leopold, they struck him with the butt of their guns, and forced him to pass through the fire. Then, taking him outside, they struck him to the ground, and gave him a blow over the head with a gun stock, and a cut of the bayonet which pierced his thigh, all the way through. Slowly, carefully, he went on with his statement: "In spite of my wound they make me pass between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-butt in the back, in order to make me march. There are seventeen or eighteen persons with me. They place us in front of their lines and menace us with their revolvers, crying out that they will make us pay for the losses they have suffered at Alost. So, we march in front of the troops. "When the battle begins, we throw ourselves on our faces to the ground, but they force us to rise again. At a certain moment, when the Germans are obliged to retire, we succeed in escaping down side streets." Hilda was watching Hinchcliffe while the peasant and the priest were speaking. Curiously and sympathetically she watched him. A change had come over the man: something arrogant had left him. Even his voice had changed, as he leaned forward and asked, "What does he say?" The banker had pulled out a black leather note-book, and was taking down the translation as the priest gave it. Something kindly welled up inside Hilda toward him. Something spoke to her heart that it was the crust of him that had fallen away. She had misjudged him. In her swift way she had been unjust. Her countryman was not hard, only unseeing. Things hadn't been brought to his attention. She was humbly glad that she had cared to show him where the right of things lay. Her fault was greater than his. He had only been blind. Distance had hidden the truth from him. But she had been severe with him to his face. She had committed the sin of pride, the sin of feeling a spiritual superiority.