“I have a pretty little girl,” Paul interrupted them. “She has hair like yours, Fräulein.” He pointed to Lucy’s corn-colored head with one upraised finger. “She must be four—five years old now.”
Lucy smiled faintly. She tried to imagine this man on the battle-field, engaged in a fierce hand-to-hand fight for the Allies’ trenches. He was the very opposite to Karl’s brutal and aggressive type, yet he was driven forward by the same irresistible force of blind obedience. Perhaps more than one Allied soldier had met death by his hand.
The vision of the firing-line led her thoughts back into another channel, with a quick pang at her heart that was half fear and half eager anticipation. The coming night Elizabeth would be off duty, and the time had come for a second visit to Captain Beattie’s prison. The evening promised to be dull and rainy. Lucy was thankful at the prospect of cloudy darkness in place of summer starlight. Michelle had crossed the hall to visit another convalescent, and Lucy rose, too, nodding good-bye to Paul, who had relapsed once more into silent apathy. Her mind was so filled with the evening’s expedition, and with her desire to talk to Michelle about it, that her thoughts wandered for a moment. The American soldier, by whom she had sat down to translate a French paper of a month back, remarked shrewdly as he glanced at his little nurse:
“Got somethin’ on your mind, Miss?” He bent down to her ear and spoke in a loud whisper. “They haven’t pushed on again? Look here, you don’t want to believe all these Fritzes tell you!”
“No, no,” said Lucy, smiling, “they haven’t got on an inch. Major Greyson says he can tell by the guns, when he goes to the depot at that end of the town. Shall I read you this?” she asked, looking over the old paper again. “You’ll have to be patient, though, for I can’t translate French very fast.”
At noon she got the moment with Michelle for which she had been waiting. She caught her friend by the arm as she was returning to the nurses’ room to take off her cap and apron.
“Michelle, wait a minute! What about tonight?” she asked eagerly.
Michelle darted a look of angry reproach from her blue eyes. She drew Lucy after her in silence into the room and over to a window opening on the deserted garden.
“Oh, Lucy,” she faltered, “will you not be careful?” She caught Lucy’s hands in hers and looked entreatingly into her downcast face. “Do you know it is my brother’s life—his life, that is in danger if they should suspect me? There are Germans all around us here, waiting to learn of any help given to their enemies. If they suspect me they will watch our house—they will catch Armand if he come——” She spoke so low Lucy could hardly hear her, but she understood and hung her head in sharp remorse and shame.
“I’m sorry, Michelle. I’m an idiot,” she said humbly.