But the girl did not answer. Slowly she walked across the yard outside the improvised hospital, without even bidding him "good-day."
"I'm glad I told her, anyhow," reflected Trevanion; "it was beastly hard--one of the hardest things I ever did. Good God, it seems the very irony of fate that he should be the man to save me! I wonder if he knew that it was I? Perhaps though he knows nothing of what passed between us. I wonder where he is now. Anyhow, he shall never have her; there's no other woman in the world for me, and--oh, yes, I'm all right."
Meanwhile, Bob still lay in bed, weak as a child, but still on the highway to recovery. He had no fever, and his wounds were beginning to heal.
Hundreds of men lay around him in the huge building which had been commandeered as a hospital; French and English soldiers were carefully nursed without a thought as to their nationality. It seemed as though all the old enmity between France and England had gone for ever, and that this terrible war made the two nations as one.
Men lay side by side, without knowing each other's language; yet, because they were fighting the same enemy, felt themselves as brothers.
"Ah, yes," said a young French officer, who had been wounded on the day when Bob had been stricken down, "we're at the beginning of a new era. Yes, we have had compulsory military service in France; we have been obliged to have it. We knew all the time that the Germans were waiting to pounce upon us and crush us; that was why we wanted to be ready. But the day is dawning, _mon ami_; we French have been a fighting nation, but we love war no longer. When the Germans are crushed, as they will be crushed; when their army and their navy are destroyed and they are forbidden ever to have others,--then the day of peace will come; then our nation will no longer be bled to pay for millions of soldiers. Yes, we Frenchmen realise it, and we will fight for it to the very last. It is not so much that Germany is an enemy to France and an enemy to England; it is that she is an enemy to peace, to goodwill, to fraternity--that is why we must fight. I had almost given up a belief in Providence, but, mon Dieu, I believe in it now; the good God is on our side."