Almost at once he saw Alixe. She was standing beside a tall wounded officer, giving him something to drink from a tin cup.
"Alixe," said Jack, "this is not your place."
She looked at him tranquilly as the wounded man was led away by a soldier of the hospital corps.
"It is my place."
"No," he said, violently, "you are trying to find death here!"
"I seek nothing," she said, in a gentle, tired voice; "let me go."
"Come back. Alixe--your brother is alive."
She looked at him impassively.
"My brother?"
"Yes."
"I have no brother."
He understood and chafed inwardly.
"Come, Alixe," he urged; "for Heaven's sake, try to live and forget--"
"I have nothing to forget--everything to remember. Let me pass." She touched the blood-stained cross on her breast. "Do you not see? That was white once. So was my soul."
"It is now," he said, gently. "Come back."
A wounded man somewhere in the smoke called, "Water! water! In the name of God!--my sister--"
"I am coming!" called Alixe, clearly.
"To me first! Hasten, my sister!" groaned another.
"Patience, children--I come!" called Alixe.
With a gesture she passed Jack; a flurry of smoke hid her. The pungent powder-fog made his eyes dim; his ears seemed to split with the terrific volley firing.
He turned away and went back across the lawn, only to stop at the well in the garden, fill two buckets, and plod back to the firing-line again. He found plenty to do there; he helped Alixe, following her with his buckets where she passed among the wounded, the stained cross on her breast. Once a bullet struck a pail full of water, and he held his finger in the hole until the water was all used up. Twice he heard cheering and the splash of cavalry in the shallow river, but they seemed to be beaten off again, and he went about his business, listless, sombre, a dead weight at his heart.
He had been kneeling beside a wounded man for some minutes when he became conscious that the firing had almost ceased. Bugles were sounding near the Château; long files of troops passed him in the lifting smoke; officers shouted along the river-bank.
He rose to his feet and looked around for Alixe. She was not in sight. He walked towards the river-bank, watching for her, but he could not find her.
"Did you see a Sister of Mercy pass this way?" he asked an officer who sat on the grass, smoking and bandaging his foot.
A soldier passing, using his rifle as a crutch, said: "I saw a Sister of Mercy. She went towards the Château. I think she was hurt."