So she got as far as: "Dearest Harvey: I am here in a hotel at

Dunkirk"--and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness.

Not so much for Harvey as for familiar things--Uncle James in his chair

by the fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the

West"; her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the

dining-room window; the voices of happy children wandering home from

school.

She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle.

Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry

with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top

of the mairie perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger,

came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer

for quiet sleep.

For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had

nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama

that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for

his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor

lorries--she called them trucks--piled high with supplies, often

fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food.

Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers,

detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers.

Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their

striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky. She would look up,

too, and there would be an aeroplane sliding along, sometimes so low

that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust.

But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for. Mostly they came

at night, a steady stream of them. Sometimes they moved rapidly.

Again, one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle

impatiently round it and go on. A silent, grim procession in the

moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those

two interminable days.

Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops--a

symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect--inside those cars were

wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care.

Surely, surely it was right that she had come. The little she could do

must count in the great total. She twisted Harvey's ring on her finger

and sent a little message to him.

"You will forgive me when you know, dear," was the message. "It is so

terrible! So pitiful!"




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