urs.'

The wings of memory bore him back to Harvard, where once in a scene from
_Hamlet_ he had mouthed those very words, little dreaming that in a few
short years he would lose the sense of euphony in the cruel realisation
of their meaning.

Then, before he saw her or heard her step, he knew that SHE had come.
His heart quickened, and his breathing was tremulous with mingled
emotions.

'Well,' she said, coming to his bedside and offering her hand, 'how is
the invalid?'

'Elise,' he said, 'it is wonderful of you to come.' He looked at her
khaki uniform, at the driver's cap which imprisoned her hair. 'Now,' he
went on dreamily, 'it all comes back to me. It was you who brought me
here.'

'Had you forgotten that already?' she said, bringing a chair to the
bedside.

'I couldn't remember,' he answered weakly. 'All I know is that I was
walking alone--and there came a blank. When I woke up I was here with a
head that didn't feel quite like my own. But I knew, somehow, that you
had been with me.'

'What does the doctor say about your wound?'

'It is not serious.'

'You have heard since what happened?'

'Yes.'

'It was absolutely topping the way you fought for that child's life.'

He made a deprecatory gesture, and for a moment conversation ceased. He
was wondering at her voice. A subtle change had come over it. Her words
were just as uncomfortably rapid as in the first days of their
friendship, but there was a hidden quality caught by his ear which he
could not analyse. Looking at her with eyes that had waited so long for
her coming, he felt once more the affinity she held with things of
nature. Her presence obliterated everything else. They were alone--the
two of them. The hospital, London, the world, were dimmed to a distant
background.

'After such a night,' he said, 'it is very kind of you to make this
effort.'

'Not at all. We're cousins, you know.'

'I--I don't'----

'The Americans and the English, I mean. Relatives always go to each
others' funerals, so I thought I might stretch a point and take in the
hospital.'

'Oh! That was all?'

'Goodness, no! You automatically became a protege of mine when I picked
you up last night. Isn't that a horrid expression?--but frightfully
fashionable these unmoral days.'

'You must excuse me,' he said slowly, 'but I was foolish enough to think
you came here because--well, because you wanted to.'

'So I did. An air-raid casualty is ever so