She stepped forward and touched my arm with such a small and child-like hand that I wondered stupidly how it could be of use in a soldiers’ hospital.

“You mustn’t let Nathaniel stay here any longer. He’ll get well if you can take him away.”

The chief surgeon spoke sharply. “You can’t take away a deserter, Miss Phipps. You’ve proved yourself a good nurse, but that doesn’t give you the right to talk nonsense. I gave you permission to step out here and speak to your brother. Kindly do that and nothing else.”

Ellen ignored him and spoke to me. “If you don’t take Nathaniel away, I’m afraid he won’t get well.”

“Upon my word!” Hayes cried. “I never heard such nonsense! The ball merely passed from the sub-clavicular region around into the deltoid muscle, leaving a slight intercostal inflammation on the left side. Except that, the fellow’s as healthy as I am!”

Ellen shook her head. “It’s true the wound in his body isn’t a bad one, but the one in his mind is. In his mind? Ah, in his heart, poor boy! In his heart!”

“Yes,” I said bitterly. “Heart, reputation and body too: he has wounds enough! Where is she who put them there, Ellen?”

Ellen’s voice was as bitter as mine. “Where she’ll not help him or us. Lanaudiere went back to Canada long ago; and before the last battle he sent for her, and she went. I heard her talking with your brother, that night when she was going—I heard him speaking hoarsely; heard her tell him he was tiresome and had tired her a long time. After that he understood what had happened to him, and why it was, and so he didn’t want to live. He tried to cross to the American lines, and the British sentries shot him. I’ve been with him ever since, trying to make him want to live, but I can’t. You’ll have to do that, if you can.”

In spite of the tragic pictures that came into my mind at Ellen’s words, I felt a little thrill of pride in Nathaniel. At least he had tried to come back to us. Whatever might happen to him now, I said to myself, his wound was an honorable one.

“So she told him he was tiresome.”

Ellen nodded. “She called him gauche. His innocence, she said, was painful to her. It was no longer refreshing to deceive him.”

It seemed strange to me that as she spoke, my mind, instead of being filled with the two people dearest to me in the world, and now close to me after a long absence, should be filled with a picture of the woman I hated—Marie de Sabrevois. I say “hated,” and yet I think that word doesn’t express the feeling I had for her, which was a curious, bitter, poisoned kind of admiration. She’d been too much for us all—too much, years ago, for Nason: too much now for Ellen, for me, and alas and alas, for Nathaniel. One might even say she’d been too much for Arnold and Schuyler. She had helped do them infinite harm. She’d harmed us all: damaged everything she’d touched; and yet she went scatheless. I seemed to see her, perfumed and elegant, in Quebec—nay, in London again, and Paris, always evil, always plotting mischief, disaster, tragedy for helpless victims.