to the stretcher.

Between them they lifted him very slowly and gently into the ambulance.

"There, Monsieur, at the bottom."

At the bottom because of the steady drip, drip, that no bandaging could
staunch. He lay straight and stiff, utterly unconcerned, and his feet in
their enormous boots, slightly parted, stuck out beyond the stretcher.
The four others sat in a row down one side of the car and stared at him.

The cure climbed in after him, carrying the Host. He knelt there,
where the blood from the smashed head oozed through the bandages and
through the canvas of the stretchers to the floor and to the skirts of
his cassock.

The Last Sacrament. Charlotte waited till it was over, standing stolidly
by the tail of the car. She could have cried then because of the sheer
beauty of the cure's act, even while she wondered whether perhaps the
wafer on his tongue might not choke the dying man.

The cure hovered on the edge of the car, stooping with a certain
awkwardness; she took from him his missal and his purple bag as he
gathered his cassock about him and came down.

"Can I do anything, Monsieur?"

"No, Mademoiselle. It _is_ done."

His eyes smiled at her; but his lips were quivering as he took again
his missal and his purple bag. She watched him going on slowly down the
street till he turned into the wine-shop. She wondered: Had he seen?
Did he know why John was there? In another minute John came out,
hurrying to the car.

He glanced down at the blood stains by the back step; then he looked in;
and when he saw the man lying on the stretcher he turned on her in fury.

"What are you thinking of? I told you you weren't to take him."

"I had to. I couldn't leave him there. I thought--"

"You've no business to think."

"Well, but the cure--"

"The cure doesn't know anything about it."

"I don't care. If he's in a clean bed--if they take his boots off--"

"I told you they can't spare clean beds for corpses. He'll be dead before
you can get him there."

"Not if we're quick."

"Nonsense. We must get him out of that."

He seized the handle of the stretcher and began pulling; she hung on to
his arm and stopped that.

"No. No," she said. "You shan't touch him."

He flung her arm off and turned. "You fool," he said. "You fool."

She looked at him steadily, a long look that remembered, that made
him remember.

"There isn't time," she said. "They'll begin _firing_ in another minute."

"Damn you." But h