issue at night from a coal mine, too weary for speech. Only here they
were packed together closely, and they did not speak, and some of them
were wounded.

"There are so many!" she whispered to Henri. "A hundred such efforts as
mine would not be enough."

"I would to God there were more!" Henri replied, through shut teeth.

"Listen, mademoiselle," he said later. "You cannot do all the kind work
of the world. But you can do your part. And you will start by caring for
only such as are wounded or ill. The others can go on. But every night
some twenty or thirty, or even more, will come to your door--men
slightly wounded or too weary to go on without a rest. And for those
there will be a chair by the fire, and something hot, or perhaps a clean
bandage. It sounds small? But in a month, think! You will have given
comfort to perhaps a thousand men. You--alone!"

"I--alone!" she said in a queer choking voice. "And what about you?
It is you who have made it possible."

But Henri was looking down the street to where the row of poplars hid
what lay beyond. Far beyond a star shell had risen above the flat
fields and floated there, a pure and lovely thing, shedding its white
light over the terrain below. It gleamed for some thirty seconds and
went out.

"Like that!" Henri said to her, but in French. "Like that you are to me.
Bright and shining--and so soon gone."