She said, putting out her hand entreatingly:
“Your praise is undeserved. I have often reproached myself since, for the lack of tact and discrimination which I showed that night in our conversation at the Embassy. Upon the first occasion of our meeting, you may remember that you bestowed your confidence upon me very freely, very generously.... Possibly that is why I spoke to you candidly, as an old friend or an elder sister, forgetting that I had no right....”
“The right was yours!” said Dunoisse, gripping his thin hands together and speaking low and eagerly. “It is yours to-day! it will always belong to you! In exchange, you have given me a noble woman to believe in, an earthly angel to be my guardian and guide. How can I speak to you, who are so much above me, of what is in my heart towards you? How dare I dream——”
He broke off, for she had silenced him with an entreating look.
“I must go!” she said, and penciled a hasty line in a memorandum-book taken from her apron pocket, and tore out the scribbled leaf, and put it in his hand. “Give this to the Head of our Medical Department, Surgeon-Major Cray, if you are in earnest in your wish to help us? When I have leisure, we shall meet again, and I will hear your story. And in the meantime, have courage! You are among friends here!”
“If I have one in you,” said Dunoisse, deeply moved, “I need no other, for God has given me the best of all!... Yet one question I must entreat you to answer, before you leave me. You said just now that you had dreamed I was a prisoner.... To me, as I walked upon the ramparts under guard one day last March, came a message, in answer to a cry of waking anguish. For I called upon a woman’s name in my loneliness and desolation, and the woman answered—
“‘I hear you! Oh! where are you!’...”
It was the unforgettable voice, the very words that were graven upon his memory. Her bosom heaved, her eyes were starry, the rosy flush had risen to her very hair. He said, with a shock of joy in the revelation:
“I am sure, but I need words to confirm the belief that is mine already. Answer me, I entreat you! Was not the voice that answered yours?”
She bent her head and hurried swiftly from Dunoisse, leaving him standing in the great Hospital quadrangle, under the hot, blue, November sky.