will be almost gone in a few months. You see you are so healthy.”

“It isn’t altogether the scars. If you think they are pretty, maybe she will, too. There is something else. I want to read over all this packet of letters before I decide something. You had better begin or that big, black, bounding beggar over there will begin to whine for water again. After you read the letters, maybe I will tell you the other reason why my friend in Kentucky might not want to see me.”

He took from under his pillow a packet of little blue letters, tightly tied with a piece of twine.

“Here they are! These letters have meant a lot to me while I was in the trenches. They still mean a lot to me. They were written by my Fairy Godmother.”

“Oh! Are they love letters?”

“No, indeed! I wouldn’t ask a woman to read another woman’s love letters. I wouldn’t let anyone but you read these letters, but my eyes are too punk to read them myself and I have to—to hear them to decide something, something very important.”

“All right! A nurse is a kind of father confessor and what one hears professionally is sacred.”

“But, my dear, I am not thinking of you as a nurse.”

“But I am thinking of you as a patient.”

She slipped the top letter from the packet and turned it over. “So your name is Stephen Scott!”

“Didn’t you know my name, either? How funny!”

“I only know the names of the patients who have charts, and you are too well to waste a chart on. We nurses call you the convalescent American. Sure these are not love letters?”

“Of course!” impatiently. “But if you don’t want to read them to me, just say so. Maybe you are tired. Of course you are. You look pale and your little hand is trembling.”

“No, no! I am not tired! Let me begin.”

The salle de bal of the old château was very quiet. The wounded soldiers were dropping off to sleep one by one. Even the Bedouin chief had stopped rolling his eyes and was softly snoring. In a low clear voice she read the letters.