car--a shell drove him back--a
second dash and he made it, turned the car, and the women darted in.
They sped down the road to the edge of the village, and here the nurses
found shelter. Later that day the Colonel handed them a written order to
evacuate Pervyse, lent them men to help, and gave them twenty minutes in
which to pack and depart. They returned to their smashed house, and
piled out their household goods. They left in the ambulance with all
the soldiers cheering them. They were a sad little lot. So the loyal
four months of service were ended under a few hours of gun-fire, and
Hilda and her friends had to follow "Pervyse" to his new home.

As she went down the road, she took one last look at the shattered
place. No house in her earthly history had concentrated so many
memories. There she had put off the care-free girl, and achieved her
womanhood, as if at a stroke. There she and her friends had healed a
thousand soldiers. They had welcomed the Queen, princes, generals, brave
officers soon to die, famous artists under arms, laughing peasant
soldiers, the great and the obscure, such a society gathered under the
vast pressure of a world-war as had seldom graced the "At-Homes" of an
Iowa girl. There she had won fame, and a dearer thing yet, honor, which
needs not to be known in order to shed its lonely comfort. She was
leaving it all, forever, in that heap of plaster and crumbling brick.

* * * * *

She had rarely had him out of mind since that experience in Wetteren
Convent, when they two had visited the little girl who lay dying of her
bayonet wounds. But it was a full five months since she had seen him.

"I had to come back," said Hinchcliffe; "New York seemed out of it. I
know there is work for me here--some little thing I can do to help you
all.

"What luck?" he added.

"A shell has been following me around," replied Hilda. "So far, it has
aways called too late, or missed me by a few feet of masonry. But it's
on my trail. It took the windows out of my room at a doctor's house in
Furnes. Later on, it went clean through my little room up over a
tailor's shop. In Pervyse we had our Poste de Secours in the
Burgomaster's house. One morning we had stepped out for a little
air--we were a couple of hundred yards down the road--when a big shell
broke in the house. And now our last home in Pervyse is blown to pieces.
Luck is good to me."

Hinchcliffe took his place, and a strong p