“Yes,” laughed the Doctor, “in the very first line.”

“What odds are you giving now, Bill?” asked Henry bitterly.

“In the very first line,—­” we could all three see the Eager face, the proud blue eyes, the pretty effective hands brushing the straying crinkly strands of red hair from her forehead, as she sat there in the bare little nurses’ room, bringing her first promotion in pride to the young Doctor.  Perhaps he did not realize all that it meant.  For you see he was very young.  Certainly he did not understand about the odds and repeated the word in a question.  Henry cut in, “Oh, nothing, only that night after they went walking in the hospital yard, Bill made me give him three to five.  Now I ought to have two to one.  It’s all over but the shouting.”  And Henry laughed at the Young Doctor’s bewilderment; but the young Doctor looked at his bandaged hand and shook his head.  The walk in the hospital yard was disturbing news to him.

“Ah, don’t worry about that,” Henry reassured him.  “Why, man, you ought to have heard what she said about you!” And Henry, being a good-natured sort, told the Doctor what the Eager Soul had said to the Gilded Youth in the hospital compound, while the buzzing monsters in the air were singing their nightingale songs of death in the moonlight.

We left the Young Doctor after he had squeezed out of us all the news we had of the girl.  Long after we had passed through the garden gate, out into the white, gravel-paved court under the proud arch and into the crooked, low, grey-walled canyon of the street, we thought of the Young Doctor sitting there reading blue eyes into china asters, red hair into dahlias, pink cheeks into the phlox, and hearing ineffable things whispered among the leaves of the melancholy yew tree.  And all that, in a land of waste and desolation, with war’s alarms on every wind.

And we thought that he looked more like a poet than a Doctor even in his uniform; and less like a soldier than either.  Such is the alchemy of love in youth!

CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY

As the autumn deepened we found our Red Cross work ending.  This work had taken Henry and me from our quiet country newspaper offices in Kansas and had suddenly plunged us into the turmoil of the big war.  For days and days we had been riding in motor cars along the line in France from Rouen to Bacarat and often ambulances had hauled us—­always more or less frightened—­up near the trenches of the front line.  We had tramped through miles of hospitals and had snuggled eagerly into the little dugouts and caves that made the first aid posts.  We had learned many new and curious things—­most of which were rather useless in publishing the Wichita Beacon or the Emporia Gazette; as, for instance, how to wear a gas mask, how to fire a trench mortar, how to look through a trench periscope, and how to duck