and was never unkind, but I
felt that she took little comfort or pleasure from my society. Mona
Leslie, rather huffed than chastened, I fear, by Susan's quiet
aloofness, had returned to her duties at Dunkirk. I was glad to have her
go, to be rid of the embarrassment of her explanations and counsel--to
be rid, above all, of the pointedly sympathetic and pitying pressure of
her hand. Except for a slight limp, Susan now got about freely and was
busily engaged with our Red Cross directors on plans for a nursing-home
for the children of repatriated refugees--a home where these little
victims of frightfulness and malnutrition could be built up again into
happy soundness of body and mind, into the vigorous life-stuff needed
for the future of France and of the world. A too-medieval chateau at
----, in Provence, had been offered; and plans for its immediate
alteration and modernization were being drawn.

The whole thing, from the first, had been Susan's idea, and she was to
have charge of it all--once the required plant was ready--as became its
creator. But indeed, in the interim, she had simply taken charge of our
Red Cross architects and buyers and builders and engineers, and was
sweeping things forward with a tactful but exceedingly high hand. She
meant that the interim should be, if possible, brief.

"I want results," said Susan; "we can discuss the rules we've broken
afterward. The children are fading out _now_, and some of them will be
dead or hopelessly withered before we can aid them. Let's get some kind
of home and get it running; with a couple of good doctors, an
orthopedist, a dental expert, and the right nurses--and I'll pick
_them_, please!--we can make out somehow, 'most anywhere."

There was no standing against her. It was presently plain to all of us
in the Paris headquarters that this nursing home was to be put through,
in record time, Germans or no Germans, and no matter who fell by the
wayside! And, in spite of my natural anxiety, I was soon convinced that
whoever fell, it would not be Susan--not, at least, till the clear flame
of her spirit had burned out the oil of her energy to its last granted
drop.

In the rare intervals of these labors, she was arranging for the legal
adoption of James Aulard Kane. No step of this kind is easily arranged
in bureaucratic France. It is a difficult land to be legally born in or
married in, or to die in--if one wishes to do these things, at least,
with a certain decency