The other reddened and her eyes flashed: “What God do you mean?” she retorted. “If I have anything to say about my destination after death I shall go wherever love is. And it does not dwell with the God or in the Heaven that we have been taught to desire and hope for.”
The Swedish girl patted her shoulder and smiled 9 in good humoured deprecation at Brisson and Estridge.
“God let her dearest friend die under the rifles of the Reds,” she explained cheerfully, “and my little comrade can not reconcile this sad affair with her faith in Divine justice. So she concludes there isn’t any such thing. And no Divinity.” She shrugged: “That is what shakes the faith in youth––the seeming indifference of the Most High.”
Palla Dumont sat silent. The colour had died out in her cheeks, her dark, indifferent eyes became fixed.
Estridge opened the fur collar of his coat and pulled back his fur cap.
“Do you remember me?” he said to Ilse Westgard.
The girl laughed: “Yes, I remember you, now!”
To Palla Dumont he said: “And do you remember?”
At that she looked up incuriously; leaned forward slowly; gazed intently at him; then she caught both his hands in hers with a swift, sobbing intake of breath.
“You are John Estridge,” she said. “You took me to her in your ambulance!” She pressed his hands almost convulsively, and he felt her trembling under the fur robe.