Belinda knew after this interview whose manner her Cousin Paul aped. The young Lieutenant Graf von Harden was not a handsome man; but he evidently held a very high opinion of himself and was used to adulation.
The lamps were lit in the ward. She had watched several of the other huts filled with wounded. Wards I and II had most of the serious cases. The stretcher-bearers continued to come in. The surgeons were at work in the operating ward, as the French surgeons had worked there a few days before.
Save in the change of language spoken, the work of the hospital station went on much as it had before. But she saw all new faces. Few had spoken to her. There were not many women nurses, and all whom she saw were busy. From one she learned the Herr Doktor in charge was about to arrive, and she watched for him.
Suddenly there was increased bustle of attendants and soldiers at the gate in the hedge. She heard a powerful motor-car stop before the entrance. A tall figure in a helmet and long black cape and carrying a walking-stick came through the gateway.
"The Herr Doktor," was the murmur Belinda heard.
He strode down the yard. All the afternoon the hurrying stretcher-bearers had turned aside for that supine figure lying on the ground—the body of the good physician who had governed the hospital under the French régime. The advancing Prussian officer halted beside it.
"What is that?" he asked, turning the body half over with his cane. He saw the cross and military insignia upon the dead man's breast. "Ha! Chief of the Medical Staff, eh? Well, let him not lie here. Bury the dog."
He marched on, passing Belinda's door without a glance. The girl had shrunk back, hiding herself within the ward. She was trembling and afraid. Fear laid hold upon her—such fear as she had not experienced since entering upon her work on the battlefields. For it was, in large part, that uncanny shrinking of the soul she had been wont to feel in the New York hospital. And it was from the same cause.
The grim, helmeted figure that stalked down the yard, the chief of this German hospital unit, was Doctor Franz Herschall!