ay as she repeated her litany
of pain. She was, indeed, the only passenger in that compartment whose
eyes were dry. _Stabat Mater Dolorosa._

XVIII

BARBARA

It was the Duchess of X.'s Hospital at a certain _plage_ on the coast. I
had motored thither through undulating country dotted with round beehive
ricks and past meadows on which a flock of gulls, looking in the
distance like a bed of white crocuses, were settled in platoons. As we
neared the coast the scenery changed to shifting dunes of pale sand,
fine as flour, and tufted with tussocks of wiry grass. Here clumps of
broom and beech, with an occasional fir, maintained a desperate
existence against the salt winds from the Atlantic, and the beeches held
up plaintive arms like caryatids supporting the intolerable architrave
of the sky. The bare needle-like branches of the broom and fir stood out
blackly against the biscuit-coloured sand with the sharp outlines of an
etching.

I had taken a hospitable cup of tea with the Duchess in the Matron's
room. She was clothed in fine linen but without her purple; she wore
the ordinary and serviceable slate-coloured dress of a nurse. It was
here I had the honour of being introduced to Barbara. She was nursing a
doll with great tenderness, and had been asking the Duchess why she did
not wear her "cowonet."

"This is Barbara--our little Egyptian," said the matron.

Barbara repudiated the description hotly.

"She was born in Egypt," explained the matron.

"Ah," I said, "that wasn't your fault, Barbara, was it? But it was
Egypt's good fortune."

Barbara ignored the compliment with the simplicity of childhood, and
proceeded to explain with great seriousness: "You see, Mummy was
travelling, and she comed to Egypt. She didn't know I was going to
happen," she added as if to clear Mummy of any imputation of
thoughtlessness.

"And your birthday, Barbara?"

Barbara and I discovered that both of us have birthdays in March--only
six days apart. This put us at once on a footing of intimacy--we must
have been born under the same star. Barbara proceeded to inform me that
she rather liked birthdays--except the one which happened in Egypt. I
had half a mind to execute a deed of conveyance on the spot, assigning
to her all my own birthdays as an estate _pour autre vie_, with all
_profits a prendre_ and presents arising therefrom, for I am
thirty-eight and have no further use for them.

"I am afraid there are more than six y