Lucy had not Michelle’s long and bitter experience to develop her powers of caution and concealment. She was not made for a conspirator, and her frank and candid nature did not easily get used to a life in which walls had ears as truly and as perilously as in any old story of intrigue and adventure.
“Can we talk safely here, do you think?” she asked timidly.
“Yes, but speak softly,” said Michelle, flashing a forgiving smile. “You wish to tell me the hour when I should look for you?” she asked, once more growing grave and earnest.
“Yes. We will be there as near to nine o’clock as possible. Of course we can’t be sure.”
“Come to the door by the garden path—you know? I will have ready all that we can spare. It is little.”
“Oh, he’ll be glad to get it. I can’t bring much from here,” said Lucy. She had nothing to give but a part of her own scanty food, but remembering the young Englishman, half-starved in his dismal captivity, how trifling her sacrifice seemed.
“I will watch for you. Oh, Lucy, I hope all goes well!” Michelle’s eyes were troubled as she spoke, but Lucy, feeling courageous at that moment, smiled back at her, saying:
“Don’t worry. The night will be too dark for any one to see us. Look, there’s Clemence.”
The old Frenchwoman, returning from the food-depot with her basket, was standing outside the garden gate, glancing doubtfully past the sentry toward the hospital window. Michelle bade Lucy a hasty good-bye and, drawing her pass from the pocket of her dress, made for the door into the garden.
Elizabeth had taken on herself the task of setting the nurses’ table and bringing in their food, so as to watch over Lucy and see that she had enough to eat. It was lunch-time now, and Lucy left the window to help in carrying in the meagre supplies. A platter of baked potatoes, a pot of coffee and two slices apiece of coarse black bread, was what the nurses sat down to after a hard morning’s work; but they were hungry enough to find it good. Lucy was, too, but curbing her appetite, she managed in the course of the meal to slip her two potatoes and a slice of bread into her apron pocket unnoticed. It was little enough, she felt, to take a hungry man, but the dairy supplies were strictly reserved for the wounded, and she saw no chance of getting to Mère Breton’s cottage that day. She could only hope, with Michelle’s help, to eke out a tolerable meal.