Her face was dirty, her hair wind-blown.  She was muddy and without a trace of the smartness for which she had been famous.  She was simply a hard-worked woman in clothes of masculine cut, yet never had she seemed so beautiful to her lover.  He bent and kissed her in the market-place.  He was an undemonstrative Englishman, but there was that in her eyes which carried him away from self-consciousness.

“I saw McKenzie in Paris,” he said.  “He told me that you were here.”

“We came over together.  Did you get my letter?”

“I have had no letters.  But now that I have you, nothing matters.”

“Really?  Somehow I don’t feel that I deserve it.”

“Deserve what?”

“All that you are giving me.  But I have liked to think of it.  It has been a prop to lean on—­”

“Only that—?”

“A shield and a buckler, dearest, a cross held high—­” Her breath came quickly.

* * * * * *

They sat side by side on the worn doorstep of a shattered building and talked.

“I am in a shack—­a baraque,—­they call it,” Drusilla told him, “with three other women.  We have fixed up one room a little better than the others, and whenever the men come through the town some of them drift in and are warmed by our fire, and I sing to them; they call me ’The Singing Woman.’”

She did not tell him how she had mothered the lads.  She was not much older than some of them, but they had instinctively recognized the maternal quality of her interest in them.  With all her beauty they had turned to her for that which was in a sense spiritual.

Hating the war, Drusilla yet loved the work she had to do.  There was, of course, the horror of it, but there was, too, the stimulus of living in a world of realities.  She wondered if she were the same girl who had burned her red candles and had served her little suppers, safe and sound and far away from the stress of fighting.

She wondered, too, if women over there were still thinking of their gowns, and men of their gold.  Were they planning to go North in the summer and South in the winter?  Were they still care-free and comfortable?

People over here were not comfortable, but how little they cared, and how splendid they were.  She had seen since she came such incredibly heroic things—­men as tender as women, women as brave as men—­she had seen human nature at its biggest and best.

“I have never been religious,” she told the Captain, earnestly; “our family is the kind which finds sufficient outlet in a cool intellectual conclusion that all’s right with the world, and it doesn’t make much difference what comes hereafter.  You know the attitude?  ’If there is future life, we shall be glad to explore, and if there isn’t, we shall be content to sleep!’

“But since I have been over here, I have carried a little prayer-book, and I’ve read things to the men, and when I have come to that part ‘Gladly to die—­that we may rise again,’ I have known that it is true, Captain—­”