Hinchcliffe was used to swift decisions.
"I'll do it," he said.
Hilda took him straight to Ghent. Then she pushed her inquiries out among her Belgian friends. The day before, there had been a savage fight at Alost.
"You will find what you want in Wetteren Hospital," suggested Monsieur Caron, Secretary of the Ghent Red Cross, to Hilda.
"To-morrow, we will go there," she said.
That first evening, she led Hinchcliffe through Ghent. In her weeks of work there, she had come to love the beautiful old town. It was strangely unlike her home cities—the brisk prairie "parlor city," where she had grown up inch by inch, as it extended itself acre by acre, and the mad modern city where she had struggled for her bread. The tide of slaughter was still to the east: a low rumble, like surf on a far-away beach. Sometimes it came whinnying and licking at the very doorstep, and then ebbed back, but never rolled up on the ancient city. It was only an under-hum to merriment. It sharpened the nerve of response to whatever passing excellence there was in the old streets and vivid gardens. Modern cities are portions of a world in the making. But Ghent was a completed and placid thing, as fair as men could fashion it.
As evening fell, they two leaned on St. Michel's bridge of the River Lys. Just under the loiterers, canals that wound their way from inland cities to the sea were dark and noiseless, as if sleep held them. The blunt-nosed boats of wide girth that trafficked down those calm reaches were as motionless as the waters that floated them. Out of the upper air, bells from high towers dropped their carillon on a population making its peace with the ended day. Cathedral and churches and belfry were massed against the night, cutting it with their pinnacles till they entered the region of the early stars and the climbing moon.