CHAPTER XXIII
HEADQUARTERS
A WOMAN!" she heard a man’s voice say at her ear. She was lying upon the ground, and strange faces were bending over her. “Well, I’m damned!”
English!
“And the other?” she heard again. “Dead as a ’errin’!”
Doris sat up, staring at them wildly.
“Wait! There’s a flutter ’ere yet.” She heard the other man say. “Come, Bill. Let’s have ’im over to the ’ouse.”
Doris managed to find a whisper. “A surgeon—for him,” she said to the man supporting her. “He will not die. He is only wounded.”
It was her obsession. It would not leave her.
She saw them carrying Cyril toward the house, and when they wanted to take her, too, she said that she would walk. Though deathly weak, she managed to reach the house where they had carried Cyril. They gave her a drink of something and she revived.
It was a Red Cross station, they told her, and the doctor would be here in a moment. But in the meanwhile first aid was administered, and at her place at his bedside she saw Cyril struggling faintly back to life.
“He will not die,” she repeated quietly when the surgeon had examined him gravely.
“I hope not—but he’s bled a good deal. We’ll see.”
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