The two walking before him ascended the steps and withdrew into the deep doorway, where they clung together in an embrace so long and still that it was like death.  At last they drew shuddering apart.  The girl sat down on the stone bench beside the door.  The soldier threw himself upon the pavement at her feet, and rested his head on her knee, his one arm lying across her lap.

In the shadow of the houses opposite, Claude kept watch like a sentinel, ready to take their part if any alarm should startle them.  The girl bent over her soldier, stroking his head so softly that she might have been putting him to sleep; took his one hand and held it against her bosom as if to stop the pain there.  Just behind her, on the sculptured portal, some old bishop, with a pointed cap and a broken crozier, stood, holding up two fingers.

III

The next morning when Claude arrived at the hospital to see Fanning, he found every one too busy to take account of him.  The courtyard was full of ambulances, and a long line of camions waited outside the gate.  A train-load of wounded Americans had come in, sent back from evacuation hospitals to await transportation home.

As the men were carried past him, he thought they looked as if they had been sick a long while—­looked, indeed, as if they could never get well.  The boys who died on board the Anchises had never seemed as sick as these did.  Their skin was yellow or purple, their eyes were sunken, their lips sore.  Everything that belonged to health had left them, every attribute of youth was gone.  One poor fellow, whose face and trunk were wrapped in cotton, never stopped moaning, and as he was carried up the corridor he smelled horribly.  The Texas orderly remarked to Claude, “In the beginning that one only had a finger blown off; would you believe it?”

These were the first wounded men Claude had seen.  To shed bright blood, to wear the red badge of courage,—­that was one thing; but to be reduced to this was quite another.  Surely, the sooner these boys died, the better.

The Texan, passing with his next load, asked Claude why he didn’t go into the office and wait until the rush was over.  Looking in through the glass door, Claude noticed a young man writing at a desk enclosed by a railing.  Something about his figure, about the way he held his head, was familiar.  When he lifted his left arm to prop open the page of his ledger, it was a stump below the elbow.  Yes, there could be no doubt about it; the pale, sharp face, the beak nose, the frowning, uneasy brow.  Presently, as if he felt a curious eye upon him, the young man paused in his rapid writing, wriggled his shoulders, put an iron paperweight on the page of his book, took a case from his pocket and shook a cigarette out on the table.  Going up to the railing, Claude offered him a cigar.  “No, thank you.  I don’t use them any more.  They seem too heavy for me.”  He struck a match, moved his shoulders again as if they were cramped, and sat down on the edge of his desk.