is mother's murderer.

During the whole day he worked on untiringly and--it seemed--unmoved.
Then, at the end of the last operation, he dropped as if he had been
shot through the brain.

This was the beginning of a long, peculiar illness which no doctor who
attended him could satisfactorily diagnose. He was constantly delirious,
repeating the words of the Bavarian: "Hilda--Hilda!--the corner
house--Rue Princesse Marie--Luneville!" and it was feared that, if he
recovered, he would be insane. After many weeks, however, he came slowly
back to himself--a changed self, but a sane self. Always odd in his
appearance--very tall and dark and thin--he had wasted to a walking
skeleton, and his black hair had turned snow-white. He had lost his
self-confidence, and dreaded to take up work again lest he should fail
in some delicate operation. Long leave was granted, and he was advised
by doctors who were his friends to go south, to sunshine and peace. But
Herter insisted that the one hope for ultimate cure was to stay in
Lorraine. He took up his quarters in what was left of a house near the
ruin of his mother's old home, in Luneville, but he was never there for
long at a time. He was provided with a pass to go and come as he liked,
being greatly respected and pitied at headquarters; and wherever there
was an air raid, there speedily and mysteriously appeared Paul Herter
among the victims.

His artificial foot did not prevent his riding a motor-bicycle, and on
this he arrived, no matter at what hour of night or day, at any town
within fifty miles of Luneville, when enemy airmen had been at work. He
gave his services unpaid to poor and rich alike; and owing to the dearth
of doctors not mobilized, the towns concerned welcomed him thankfully.
All the surgeon's serene confidence in himself returned in these
emergencies, and he was doing invaluable work. People were grateful, but
the man's ways and looks were so strange, his restlessness so tragic,
that they dubbed him "le Juif Errant."

Now, Padre, I have come to the right place to bring in my part of this
story.

While I was training at "Bart's," I met a doctor named Paul Herter. Some
of the girls used to call him the "German Jew" but we all knew that his
Germanness was only an accident of fate, through a war before he was
born, and that he was passionately French at heart. He was clever--a
genius--but moody and queer, and striking to look at. He would have been
ugly but for a pair