“Do not despair, I beg of you, my friend. She is not dead—it is impossible that she should be dead! Fate could not be so cruel. With her you shared a few glorious days of peril, of trial, and of ecstasy—then you were whirled apart. But only for a time. Somewhere, sometime, you will find her again, awaiting you. I know it! I feel it!”
But it was no longer Fernande that Stewart heard—it was another voice, subtle, delicate, out of the unknown——
His bosom lifted with a deep, convulsive breath.
“You are right!” he whispered. “I, too, feel it! Sometime—somewhere——”
And his trembling fingers sought that tress of lustrous hair, warm above his heart.
Far away to the east, a sentry in the gray uniform of the German army paced slowly back and forth before a great white house looking across a terraced garden down upon the Meuse. Three days before, it had been the beautiful and carefully-ordered home of a wealthy Belgian; now it reeked with the odor of ether and iodine. In the spacious dining-room an operating-table had been installed, and a sterilizing apparatus simmered in one corner. Along its halls and in every room rows of white cots were ranged—and each cot had its bandaged occupant.
On the terrace overlooking the river, two surgeons, thoroughly weary after a hard day, sat smoking and talking in low tones. Within, a white-clad nurse stole from cot to cot, assuring herself that all was as well as might be.
In a tiny room on the upper floor, a single cot had been placed. As the nurse stopped at its open door and held aloft her night-lamp, her eyes caught the gleam of other eyes, and she stepped quickly forward.
“What is it?” she asked, softly. “Why are you not asleep? You are not in pain?”