Nor was she wrong in this expectation. Only, the crooked little man's explosion of feeling was not just what the nurse had expected.
One of the strangers could keep nothing on his stomach at first, and, knowing little French, the poor fellow was slow in making his need of the basin understood by Erard.
"Ah, these sales étrangers!" growled Erard. "Nom de Dieu! that I should serve the cochon! Why do they not let them die where they fall? Or stick them with the bayonet, as they do our poor poilus when they have too many prisoners?"
Then suddenly he saw how pallid the man was and how he had fallen limply on his pillow.
"Ah, Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!" he called softly to Belinda. "Come quickly! What shall we do? This poor fellow is dying!"
And the two worked over the man an hour to save him once more from the grave.
At the end of the ward a delirious patient had been flung upon a cot. Had he not been so weak they must have strapped him down. From side to side he rolled his head. He was just a pretty, fair-haired boy—a mother's boy. And if that mother could have seen the poor, tortured limbs and the great shrapnel wound in his thigh!
Belinda went to his side no more frequently than she did to the others. Yet she was haunted by the suffering and by the youth of the lad. Once she lingered to lay a palm upon his pain-wrinkled, sweating brow.
"Ach, liebes Mütterlein! Mein Mütterlein!" he murmured, and somehow managed to seize the nurse's hand.
For ten minutes Belinda stood, until the weak fingers slipped from her hand and the boy slept. And what were her thoughts?