l all go together."

"Is not America the destination of your long journey?" inquired the
big, blue-eyed girl.

Brisson chuckled: "Yes," he said, "but bullets sometimes shorten
routes and alter destinations. I think you ought to know the worst."

"If that's the worst, it's nothing to frighten one," said the Swedish
girl. And her crystalline laughter filled the icy air.

She put one persuasive arm around her slender, dark-eyed comrade:

"To meet God unexpectedly is nothing to scare one, is it, Palla?" she
urged coaxingly.

The other reddened and her eyes flashed: "What God do you mean?" she
retorted. "If I have anything to say about my destination after death
I shall go wherever love is. And it does not dwell with the God or in
the Heaven that we have been taught to desire and hope for."

The Swedish girl patted her shoulder and smiled in good humoured
deprecation at Brisson and Estridge.

"God let her dearest friend die under the rifles of the Reds," she
explained cheerfully, "and my little comrade can not reconcile this
sad affair with her faith in Divine justice. So she concludes there
isn't any such thing. And no Divinity." She shrugged: "That is what
shakes the faith in youth--the seeming indifference of the Most
High."

Palla Dumont sat silent. The colour had died out in her cheeks, her
dark, indifferent eyes became fixed.

Estridge opened the fur collar of his coat and pulled back his fur
cap.

"Do you remember me?" he said to Ilse Westgard.

The girl laughed: "Yes, I remember you, now!"

To Palla Dumont he said: "And do _you_ remember?"

At that she looked up incuriously; leaned forward slowly; gazed
intently at him; then she caught both his hands in hers with a swift,
sobbing intake of breath.

"You are John Estridge," she said. "You took me to her in your
ambulance!" She pressed his hands almost convulsively, and he felt her
trembling under the fur robe.

"Is it true," he said, "--that ghastly tragedy?"

"Yes."

"All died?"

"All."

Estridge turned to Brisson: "Miss Dumont was companion to the Grand
Duchess Marie," he said in brief explanation.

Brisson nodded, biting his cigar.

The Swedish girl-soldier said: "They were devoted--the little Grand
Duchess and Palla.... It was horrible, there in the convent
cellar--those young girls----" She gazed out across the snow; then,

"The Reds who did it had already made me prisoner.... They arrested me
in uniform after the decree disbanding