"But to suggest poor Erard is not to be trusted!"
"Perhaps I understand better than you do. Do you know much about Erard? About what he was before the war?"
"Why—no. He has never been communicative. I do not know, even, that he has a family. I am sure he never receives mail. But I believe him to be utterly and abandonedly French. And how he does hate the Kaiser!" Belinda whispered.
"It may be. Even the joyeux of the Bataillon d'Afrique are good patriots—and, as the whole world knows, they are convicts," Sanderson told her.
"Renaud was attached in the days before the war to that section of the Paris police that has intimately to do with the apaches—the dwellers in that underworld of Paris that everybody writes about and so few really know anything about.
"Renaud became somewhat communicative with me. This was the third time I had taken him across the lines."
"But to accuse poor Erard!" protested Belinda, who felt personally hurt by the fling at her infirmier.
"The hero's coat is not always white," Sanderson reminded her. "At the last gasp it was the denizens of the Paris underworld that held back the Germans until the British could get over. Ordinary thieves, beggars, blackguards of every type, filled those thousands of taxis that were the last resort of the brave defenders of the city, when the government had already left. And they fought like rats in a pit, because they were rats—the gutter-rats of Paris—the apaches.
"It might be that our Erard may have had a much worse reputation before the war than he has gained here in this hospital."
"Oh, I cannot think of him so! He is so unselfish, so kind to me, so thoughtful."