“I am afraid!” said the girl.
“Afraid of what?” I asked.
I repeated the question—“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?”—and she answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery.
“C’est la guerre!”
“Look out!” said the little doctor. “She’s fainting.”
She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a moment, with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed, and would have fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell, indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden weight—though she was of slight build—and they sank together in a kind of huddle on the doorstep.
“For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before her now, chafing her cold hands. She came to in about a minute, and I leaned over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from her faint whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway belonged, in the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed fingers—“cold as a toad,” said “Daddy” Small—she fumbled at her bodice and drew out a latchkey.
“We had better carry her up,” I said, and the doctor nodded.
The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and with leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy banisters. The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a little now, and managed to get her to the first landing.
“Where?” I asked, and she said, “Opposite.”