POSTSCRIPT
MYRTLE AND LAUREL LEAF
It was the week before Christmas, Nineteen-fourteen.
London wore her dreariest winter livery of mud-brown and fog-yellow, and at three o'clock on such an afternoon there would have been brilliant lights everywhere ... any other, ordinary year.
This year, Londoners had to find their way as best they could through the gloom.
Across a wide Square with a railed and shrubberied garden in the centre of it, there picked her way a very tall girl in furs that clung about her as bushy ivy hangs about some slender tree. She wore a dark velvet coat broadly belted over her strait hips, and upon her impish head there was perched one of the little, back velvet, half-military caps that were still the mode. This girl peered up at the numbers of the great houses at the side of the Square; finally, seeing the gilt-lettered inscription that she sought above one of the doors,
"ANNEXE TO THE CONVALESCENT HOME
FOR WOUNDED OFFICERS,"
she rang the bell.
The door was opened to her by a small trim damsel in the garb of the Girl-Guides, who ushered her into a large and ornate hall, and into the presence of a fresh-coloured, fair-haired Personage—she was evidently no less—in nurse's uniform.