He opened his eyes, the battle vanished, and he saw himself lying upon a low, wooden platform.  His head rested upon a small pillow, a blanket was under him, and another above him.  Turning slowly he saw other men wrapped in blankets like himself on the platform in a row that stretched far to right and left.  Above was a low roof, but both sides of the structure were open.

He understood it all in a moment.  He had come back to a world of battle and wounds, and he was one of the wounded.  But he listened for the soft, musical note which he believed now, in his imaginative state, had drawn him from the mid-region between life and death.

The stalwart figure of a woman in a somber dress with a red cross sewed upon it passed between him and the light, but he knew that it was not she who had been singing.  He closed his eyes in disappointment, but reopened them.  A man wearing a white jacket and radiating an atmosphere of drugs now walked before him.  He must be a surgeon.  At home, surgeons wore white jackets.  Beyond doubt he was one and maybe he was going to stop at John’s cot to treat some terrible wound of which he was not yet conscious.  He shivered a little, but the man passed on, and his heart beat its relief.

Then a soldier took his place in the bar of light.  He was a short, thick man in a ridiculous, long blue coat, and equally ridiculous, baggy, red trousers.  An obscure cap was cocked in an obscure manner over his ears, and his face was covered with a beard, black, thick and untrimmed.  He carried a rifle over his shoulder and nobody could mistake him for anything but a Frenchman.  Then he was not a prisoner again, but was in French hands.  That, at least, was a consolation.

It was amusing to lie there and see the people, one by one, pass between him and the light.  He could easily imagine that he was an inspection officer and that they walked by under orders from him.  Two more women in those somber dresses with the red crosses embroidered upon them, were silhouetted for a moment against the glow and then were gone.  Then a man with his arm in a sling and his face very pale walked slowly by.  A wounded soldier!  There must be many, very many of them!

The musical murmur ceased and he was growing weary.  He closed his eyes and then he opened them again because he felt for a moment on his face a fragrant breath, fleeting and very light.  He looked up into the eyes of Julie Lannes.  They were blue, very blue, but with infinite wistful depths in them, and he noticed that her golden hair had faint touches of the sun in it.  It was a crown of glory.  He remembered that he had seen something like it in the best pictures of the old masters.

“Mademoiselle Julie!” he said.

“You have come back,” she said gently.  “We have been anxious about you.  Philip has been to see you three times.”

He noticed that she, too, wore the somber dress with the red cross, and he began to comprehend.