ty house, with that look upon her face of dark
resentment.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SINGING WOMAN

Somewhere in France, Drusilla had found the Captain. Or, rather, he
had found her. He had come upon her one rainy afternoon, and had not
recognized her in her muddy uniform, with a strap under her chin. Then
all at once he had heard her voice, crooning a song to a badly wounded
boy whose head lay in her lap.

The Captain had stopped in his tracks. "Drusilla--"

The light in her eyes gave him his welcome, but she waved him away.

The boy died in her arms. When she joined her lover, she was much
moved. "It is not my work to look after the wounded; I carry blankets
and things to refugees. But now and then--it happens. A shell burst
in the street, and that poor lad--! He asked me to sing for him--you
see, I have been singing for them as they go through, and he
remembered--"

He was holding both of her hands in his. "Dear woman, dear woman--"
There were people all about them, but there were no conventions in war
times, and nobody cared if he held her hands.

Her face was dirty, her hair wind-blown. She was muddy and without a
trace of the smartness for which she had been famous. She was simply a
hard-worked woman in clothes of masculine cut, yet never had she seemed
so beautiful to her lover. He bent and kissed her in the market-place.
He was an undemonstrative Englishman, but there was that in her eyes
which carried him away from self-consciousness.

"I saw McKenzie in Paris," he said. "He told me that you were here."

"We came over together. Did you get my letter?"

"I have had no letters. But now that I have you, nothing matters."

"Really? Somehow I don't feel that I deserve it."

"Deserve what?"

"All that you are giving me. But I have liked to think of it. It has
been a prop to lean on--"

"Only that--?"

"A shield and a buckler, dearest, a cross held high--" Her breath came
quickly.

* * * * * *

They sat side by side on the worn doorstep of a shattered building and
talked.

"I am in a shack--a _baraque_,--they call it," Drusilla told him, "with
three other women. We have fixed up one room a little better than the
others, and whenever the men come through the town some of them drift
in and are warmed by our fire, and I sing to them; they call me 'The
Singing Woman.'"

She did not tell him how she had mothered the lads. She was not much
older