rought us the word just now!" she
said kindly, her eyes on my pallid face. "But you must go to your own
duties. This is a great honour we have, to care for the hero who has
saved us. It must be our turn to save him. Go tell the news in the upper
wards, that we hope for the best, the very best. Say to the doctors that
it is indeed Monsieur Mars. They will know the name. They will have
heard of him, and what he did for Liege only the other day."

"I'll go, but _one_ instant first, I implore you, nurse!" I pleaded. "I
think--it may be--that Monsieur Mars is an old friend of mine. I beg you
to let me have a glimpse of his face!"

She looked at me and hesitated; but my imploring eyes, which suddenly
spouted tears, decided her kind heart in my favour. "One glance, then;
but control yourself," she said. And taking me round the waist, she led
me quickly across the room. "Mademoiselle, our young British assistant
thinks she knows the patient," the matron announced. "Make way for her,
an instant. Then she will go to her own ward."

Some one pushed me forward, at the same time holding me firmly lest I
should collapse. One fleeting glance was vouchsafed me of a form covered
with a sheet, and a blackened, blood-smeared face, with half-closed eyes
whose whites showed under the lids, and on whose lips was some strange
semblance of a happy smile. To those who did not know him well, or love
him beyond all the world, that marred face might have been
unrecognizable in its mask of dirt and blood. But nothing could disguise
it from me. Monsieur Mars, the wounded hero of Liege, and Captain Eagle
March, late of the American army, were one and the same.

* * * * *

I didn't faint, but I don't remember anything else till I found myself
sitting on a chair in my own ward. The nurses were having morning
coffee. One of them gave me a cup. If I hadn't been a nurse myself, with
patients to think of, I should have dropped it and burst out crying. But
instead, I drank the coffee; and a moment later went back to the bedside
of the man I had been tending before leave was granted me to see Tony.

"You look as if you'd met the ghost of some one you love," said the
nurse who had been keeping my place.

But he was not a ghost. Not yet--not yet!

CHAPTER XIX

Tidings of the new hero of Liege floated up to our ward within the hour.
There was slight concussion of the brain; there were scalp wounds which
had had t