'He left for Paris the day my father became so much worse—don't you remember?'
He remembered nothing, but the nurse reassured and comforted him, gave him a sense of spacious leisure in which to think of himself. 'What has to me happened?' he asked. 'Why am I here?'
'You were wounded by a shell, and I think by the wall of a falling house. We—I and your head surgeon—thought you would be more comfortable here than in the church.'
'And have you the whole time here been?' he asked wonderingly.
'Yes, and I have promised to stay with you till a surgeon comes.'
'You are hülfreicher than any surgeon,' he muttered, in so low a tone that she had to lift herself and bend over him to hear the words she did not understand.
The pale white glimmer of the dawn filtered through the white curtain stretched across the little window, and she saw that there was a change, a pinched grey look, in his face. Tears started to her eyes. Then he was not better, as she had ardently hoped. This return to consciousness, to connected thought, was not the good sign she had ignorantly supposed it to be?
Suddenly he groaned, a spent, weary groan. 'Pardon, honoured miss, it is fatigue which the pain hard makes.'
She gave him morphia. 'Try and sleep, my poor friend, and I will do likewise. The morning will soon be here.'