“You can ask that,” he said:  “you, a soldier?  Does the soldier say:  ’I am of no use.  I am but a poor man of no account.  Who has need of such as I?’ God has need of all.  There is none that shall not help to win the victory.  It is with his life the soldier serves.  Who were they whose teaching moved the world more than it has ever yet been moved by the teaching of the wisest?  They were men of little knowledge, of but little learning, poor and lowly.  It was with their lives they taught.”

“Cast out self, and God shall enter in, and you shall be One with God.  For there is none so lowly that he may not become the Temple of God:  there is none so great that he shall be greater than this.”

The speaker ceased.  There came a faint sound at which she turned her head; and when she looked again he was gone.

The wounded men had heard it also.  Dubos had moved forward.  Madame Lelanne had risen.  It came again, the thin, faint shrill of a distant bugle.  Footsteps were descending the stairs.  French soldiers, laughing, shouting, were crowding round them.

CHAPTER XVIII

Her father met her at Waterloo.  He had business in London, and they stayed on for a few days.  Reading between the lines of his later letters, she had felt that all was not well with him.  His old heart trouble had come back; and she noticed that he walked to meet her very slowly.  It would be all right, now that she had returned, he explained:  he had been worrying himself about her.

Mrs. Denton had died.  She had left Joan her library, together with her wonderful collection of note books.  She had brought them all up-to-date and indexed them.  They would be invaluable to Francis when he started the new paper upon which they had determined.  He was still in the hospital at Breganze, near to where his machine had been shot down.  She had tried to get to him; but it would have meant endless delays; and she had been anxious about her father.  The Italian surgeons were very proud of him, he wrote.  They had had him X-rayed before and after; and beyond a slight lameness which gave him, he thought, a touch of distinction, there was no flaw that the most careful scrutiny would be likely to detect.  Any day, now, he expected to be discharged.  Mary had married an old sweetheart.  She had grown restless in the country with nothing to do, and, at the suggestion of some friends, had gone to Bristol to help in a children’s hospital; and there they had met once more.

Neil Singleton, after serving two years in a cholera hospital at Baghdad, had died of the flu in Dover twenty-fours hours after landing.  Madge was in Palestine.  She had been appointed secretary to a committee for the establishment of native schools.  She expected to be there for some years, she wrote.  The work was interesting, and appealed to her.