"Did you see it? Did you feel it? And what
was it, anyway?"

She was looking for some one; and she found him with a leg shot off,
playing a mouth-organ in the farthest corner of one ward. He was a
Chasseur Alpin; he had been wounded in the same charge as Monsieur Satan.
Sheila was searching for cause and effect and she prayed this man might
help her find them. As she sat down on the edge of the cot she thanked her
particular star for a speaking knowledge of French. "Bon jour, mon ami. I
have come for your help. C'est pour Capitaine Fauchet."

The mouth-organ dropped to the floor. The eyes that had been merely
pleasantly retrospective gathered gloom. "Mais, que voulez-vous? All the
others say it is hopeless. Tell me, ma'am'selle, what can I do?"

"I don't know--I hardly know what any of us can do. But we must try
something. We know so little about shell shock, so often the impossible
happens. Tell me, were you with him?"

The soldier hitched himself forward and leaned over on one elbow.
"Toujours, ma'am'selle, always I am with him. Listen. I can tell you. I
was born in the little town of Tourteron where Bertrand Fauchet was
born--and where Nanette came to live with her brother Paul and their
uncle, the good abbe. I was not of their class; but we all played together
as children and even then Bertrand loved Nanette. The year war came they
were betrothed. I am not tiring ma'am'selle?"

"No. Go on."

"We both enlisted in the Chasseurs Alpins. They made Bertrand a
lieutenant, then a captain--he was a man to lead. And how kind, how good
to his men! That was before he had won his nom de guerre--before they
called him Monsieur Satan. If there was a danger he would see it first and
race for it, to get ahead of his men. He would give them no orders that he
would not fill with them; and always so pitying for the prisoners. 'Treat
them kindly, mes garcons,' he would cry; and what mercy he would show! Mon
Dieu! I have seen him, when his mouth was cracking with the thirst, pour
the last drop from his canteen down the throat of a dying Boche, or share
the last bread in his baluchon with a wounded prisoner. And the many times
he has crept into No Man's Land to bring in a blesse we could hear moaning
in the dark; and when it turned out a Boche, as so often it did, he would
carry him with the same tenderness. That was Bertrand Fauchet when war
began. Once I ask him, 'Why are you so careful with the Boches?' and he
smiled that littl