The elder Red-Cross knight was a tall, good-looking lad of sixteen, the age when a boy wears painfully high collars, shaves surreptitiously—and unnecessarily—with his pen-knife, talks to his juniors about the tobacco he smokes in a week, and cherishes an undying passion for a maiden older than himself. He was ever an interesting study, though I do not think I really loved him until he confided his affairs of the heart, and entrusted me with the writing of his love-letters. I know that behind my back he invariably referred to me as "Ma"; but as he openly addressed the unconscious nun as "you giddy old girl," "Ma" might almost be termed respectful, and I think our regard was mutual.
All things come to him who waits. There came a night when for the last time we sat together around the little tree, watching the Soeur light the candles that illuminated the Holy Bébé. On the morrow the prisoners, carefully disinfected, and bearing the order of their release in the form of a medical certificate, would be set free.
It clouded our gladness to know that before the patient Sister stretched another period of isolation. Just that day another pupil had developed scarlet fever, and only awaited our boys' departure to occupy the little room. Hearing that this fresh prisoner lay under sentence of durance vile, we suggested that all the toys—chiefly remnants of shattered armies that, on hearing of the Boy's illness, we had brought from the home playroom he had outgrown—might be left for him instead of being sent away to be burnt.
The Boy's bright face dulled. "If it had been anybody else! But, mother, I don't think you know that he is the one French boy we disliked. It was he who always shouted 'à bas les Anglais!' in the playground."
The reflection that for weary weeks this obnoxious boy would be the only inmate of the boîte, as the invalids delighted to call their sick-room, overcame his antipathetic feeling, and he softened so far as to indite a polite little French note offering his late enemy his sympathy, and formally bequeathing to him the reversion of his toys, including the arbre de Noël with all its decorations, except the little waxen Jesus nestling in the manger of yellow corn; the Soeur had already declared her intention of preserving that among her treasures.
The time that had opened so gloomily had passed, and now that it was over we could look back upon many happy hours spent within the dingy prison walls. And our thoughts were in unison, for the Boy, abruptly breaking the silence, said: "And after all, it hasn't been such a bad time. Do you know, I really think I've rather enjoyed it!"
L'ENVOI
