“All right in there, boys?”

“Yes,” answered a voice.

“Not cold?”

“Non.  Are we at the hospital?”

“Yes; we are trying to wake up the concierge.”

There was a sound of a key in a lock, and a small, dark woman opened the door.  She was somewhat spinstery in type, her thin, black hair was neatly parted in the middle, and her face was shrewd, but not unkindly.

“Deux blesses (two wounded), madame,” said I.

The woman pulled a wire loop inside the door, and a far-off bell tinkled.

“Come in,” she said.  “The porter will be here immediately.”

We stepped into a little room with a kind of English look to it, and a carbon print of the Sistine Madonna on the wall.

“Are they seriously wounded?” she asked.

“I cannot say.”

A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a small, beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of rubber boots, and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into the room.

“Two wounded have arrived,” said the lady.  “You are to help these messieurs get out the stretchers.”

The porter looked out of the door at the tail-light of the ambulance, glowing red behind its curtain of rain.

“Mon Dieu, what a deluge!” he exclaimed, and followed us forth.  With an “Easy there,” and “Lift now,” we soon had both of our clients out of the ambulance and indoors.  They lay on the floor of the odd, stiff, little room, strange intruders of its primness; the first, a big, heavy, stolid, young peasant with enormous, flat feet, and the second a small, nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang and bright, uneasy eyes.  The mud-stained blue of the uniforms seemed very strange, indeed, beside the Victorian furniture upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush.  A middle-aged servant—­a big-boned, docile-looking kind of creature, probably the porter’s wife—­entered, followed by two other women, the last two wearing the same cut of prim black waist and skirt, and the same pattern of white wristlets and collar.  We then carried the two soldiers upstairs to a back room, where the old servant had filled a kind of enamel dishpan with soapy water.  Very gently and deftly the beefy old porter and his wife took off the fouled, blood-stained uniforms of the two fighting men, and washed their bodies, while she who had opened the door stood by and superintended all.  The feverish, bright-eyed fellow seemed to be getting weaker, but the big peasant conversed with the old woman in a low, steady tone, and told her that there had been a big action.

When Oiler and I came downstairs, two little glasses of sherry and a plate of biscuits were hospitably waiting for us.  There was something distinctly English in the atmosphere of the room and in the demeanor of the two prim ladies who stood by.  It roused my curiosity.  Finally one of them said:—­

“Are you English, gentlemen?”