“Barbara, if what we think is true, would it not be better never to have found out. Besides, you did not recognize him, nor did I? Can Duke have been wiser?”
Barbara was crying. “Of course, Duke has senses we do not possess. Besides, we were only his friends and Duke loved him. I thought there was something familiar in the figure. No, I did not, there was never any human being so changed. Poor Eugenia! I can’t bear it.”
Lieutenant Kelley was now standing nearby, looking extremely unhappy over Barbara’s distress and extremely puzzled.
“We think perhaps Jeanne’s friend is someone we know,” Nona tried to explain, “only we cannot really believe it and there seems no way of finding out without great difficulty and sorrow.”
“Whoever he may be, Duke knows his master,” Hugh Kelley answered in a tone of entire conviction. “I believe in all the cases of this kind of which one has ever heard, there has never been a mistake.”
“Jeanne, why does your Captain always wear that bandage over his face? Is it that he is blind, or has he some wound, there? Please don’t think I ask from curiosity, but unless one can see him——”
Jeanne whispered something and the French soldier immediately bent his head. Slowly Jeanne unwound the bandage.
“He can see a little, my Captain,” Jeanne answered proudly, “only the surgeons have thought it best that he rest his eyes for a time, until his sight comes wholly back.”
“Please look: and decide, Nona dear, I don’t dare,” Barbara whispered. However, she did look of course and both she and Nona recognized in Jeanne’s soldier Eugenia’s husband, Captain Henri Castaigne.
And yet he was so changed it was not strange that they had not recognized him in their chance meeting before today.