“She may have to slap the Doctor; but she has steered this boy out of the danger zone into the open sea of friendship.”

“Oh, yes, she has; oh, yes, she has,” came the echo from the other bed!  And Henry subsided.

But the buzzing about the hospital would not let us sleep.  At three o’clock evidently they were serving tea to the nurses, or lunch of some kind.  The moon was shining straight down into the court; the Gilded Youth and the Eager Soul had gone in, and another couple, a stenographer and a hospital orderly were using it as a parlour.

“Queer, queer business, this love-making under the rustle of the wings of death,” said Henry.  A French plane flying across had filled the compound for a moment.  But everyone soon recognized its peculiar buzz.  Then for a few seconds from afar came the low ominous hum of the German planes.  But they circled away from us.  Perhaps the French drove them back.  However, it was the excitement in the court that caused Henry’s remark.  For the young people did not deflect their monotonous course about the compound, when the sky-gazers had returned indoors.  Around and around they went, talking, talking, talking, with the low insistent murmur of deeply interested people.  Their nerves were taut; emotion was raw; they were young, and their blood moved riotously.  And there was the moon, the moon that, since man could turn his face upward, has been the symbol of the thing called love.  And now all over that long line slashed across the face of Europe, the moon is the herald of death.  Men see it rise in terror, for they know that the season of the moon is the season of slaughter.  Yet there they walked in the hospital yard, two unknown lovers, who were true to the moon.

Henry’s next remark was:  “Bill, fancy when you were young doing your courting out there where a shell is liable to wipe you out any second.  We at least had the advantage of elm trees to protect us from the shafts of death.”

“Do you suppose, Henry,” answered his friend, “that they miss the drip of oars, the shade of the overhanging willows, the suggestive whisper of waters frisking over the ripples at the ford?  How can they make love in such a place?”

“‘Gold,’” replied Henry, quoting from Solomon, who was wise, “’is where you find it!’” Then we heard the insistence of the lovers’ babble drawing near us again.  As they turned a corner, Henry heaved a sigh at the perversity of youth in the flaunting neglect of sleep and death, which ever are vital to middle years.  We both looked out to the white courtyard, heard the snarl of another plane, obviously French, but still disconcerting, saw the slow even pace of the lovers, unaffected by the approaching growl of the plane, and it came to me to quote one wiser even than Solomon:  “O death, where is thy sting!”