that I could not loosen the little hands, not without hurting her.  ‘I will not let you go—­I will not let you go.’  She cried that again and again.  Till my heart was broken.  But all the same, one had to go.  One was due to join the comrades at the station, and the time was short.  So that, immediately, I had a thought.  ‘My most dear,’ I spoke to her.  ’If thou wilt let me go, then I promise to send thee a great, beautiful doll, all in white, as a bride, like the cousin Annette at her wedding last week.’  And then the clinging little hands loosened, and she said, wondering—­for she is but a baby—­’Wilt thou promise, my father?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and kissed her quickly, and went away.  So that now that I am wounded and am to die, that promise which I cannot keep to my petite, that promise hinders me to die.”

The deep, sad voice stopped and the honest eyes of the peasant boy looked up at Evelyn, burning with the pain of his body and of his soul.  And as Evelyn looked back, holding his hand and stroking it, it was as if the furnace of the soldier’s pain melted together all the things she had ever cared to do.  Yet it was a minute before she spoke.

“Corporal,” she said, “your little girl shall have her doll, I will take it to her and tell her that her father sent it.  Will you lie very still while I go and get the doll?”

The brown eyes looked up at her astounded, radiant, and the man caught the hem of her white veil and kissed it.  “But the Americans—­they do magic.  You shall see, Sister, if I shall be still.  I will not die before the Sister returns.  It is a joy unheard of.”

The girl ran out of the hospital and away into Paris, and burst upon Madame.  Somehow she told the story in a few words, and Madame was crying as she laid “La Marquise” in a box.

“It is Mademoiselle who is an angel of the good God,” she whispered, and kissed Evelyn unexpectedly on both cheeks.

Corporal Duplessis lay, waxen, starry-eyed, as the American Sister came back into the ward.  His look was on her as she entered the far-away door, and he saw the box in her arms.  The girl knelt and drew out the gorgeous plaything and stood it by the side of the still, bandaged figure.  An expression as of amazed radiance came into the fast-dimming eyes—­into those large, brown, childlike eyes which had seen so little of the gorgeousness of earth.  His hand stirred a very little—­enough, for Evelyn quickly moved the gleaming satin train of the doll under the groping fingers.  The eyes lifted to Evelyn’s face and the smile in them was that of a prisoner who suddenly sees the gate of his prison opened and the fields of home beyond.  It mattered little, one may believe, to the welcoming hosts of heaven that the angel at the gate of release for the child-soul of Corporal Duplessis, the poilu, was only Robina’s doll!

DUNDONALD’S DESTROYER

This is the year 1977.  It will be objected that the episode I am going to tell, having happened in 1917, having been witnessed by twenty-odd thousand people, must have been, if true, for sixty years common property and an old tale.  But when General Cochrane—­who saved England at the end of the great war—­told me the Kitchener incident of the story last year, sitting in the rose-garden of the White Hart Inn at Sonning-on-Thames, I had never heard of it.