eads were
bandages. Others were shaved, so that they appeared quite bald. They
were very pale heads in the bleak, grayish light filtering dimly
through the high windows. A number of bunks were hidden by screens. He
wished dully that he had this privacy, but his narrow bed had been
given no such protection.

A man was slowly walking down an aisle between rows of narrow cots all
exactly alike. Beside the man, who had a remarkably large head with a
shock of rough, straw-colored hair, was a woman dressed as a nurse. The
newly awakened one knew she was a nurse, though she was not dressed in
the costume familiar to him in some vague past. There were many in the
room wearing the same sort of cap and apron and prim gown that she
wore: young women, middle-aged women, old women. They had kind faces,
but the watcher saw no beautiful ones. Not that he cared for that, or
anything.

He had not been awake long when a big girl came towards him, paused,
peered, and went away again. She stopped the nurse who walked with the
shock-headed man, and spoke to her. The woman's cap and the man's
tousled hair turned from the direction they had been taking, and
approached his bed. They bent over it, and he gazed up stupidly at
their faces. The shock-headed man had a beard even lighter than his
hair. He smoothed it with a white, strong-looking hand, a capable hand,
the hand of the born surgeon. The woman had hard features, but soft
eyes, wistful, and pathetic.

"You see, he is getting along finely," she said to her companion. "I
think we shall have no more trouble with him now."

The man in bed remembered that he had heard her voice before, and that
she had spoken German then, as now. He did not wonder this time why he
understood what she said, though the language was not his own. He
remembered that he had learned German when he was a boy, and had hated
learning it because of the verbs.

"How do you feel?" the surgeon enquired, in English.

The man in bed tried to answer. His voice came in a weak whisper. This
surprised him, and made him ashamed. "Very--well," he heard himself
say, as he had seemed to hear himself speak in the dream which was gone
now, far away, out of reach.

"Good!" said the surgeon. "Can you tell me your name?"

The sick man thought for a moment, and the question went echoing
through his brain as a voice calling one who is absent echoes through a
deserted house. Knowledge of his helplessness brought a sense of
physic