Page:Women Wanted.djvu/69

 officer. Will he never come back? I stare at his empty chair. The clock on the mantel ticks and ticks. The fire in the grate snaps and snaps. Other people at the next desk who get easier visés than mine, come and go—a Red Cross nurse, two French sisters of charity, a little French boy returning to school. I have counted the pens in the lieutenant's glass tray. I know every blot on his desk-pad. The clock has ticked thirty-five minutes of suspense for me before the little French soldier in red trousers opens the door and the lieutenant is here.

"Well," he says, "we have decided. You are to be permitted to go, but on one condition." And he visés my passport, "No return to France during the period of the war."

It has taken nearly two weeks to win my case. Two days later at 6, when the gardens of the Tuileries are outlined dimly against the faint rays of dawn, my taxicab is reeling through the streets of Paris to the Gare St. Lazare. It is noon before the train reaches Havre. The Red Cross nurse, the London newspaper correspondent and the Belgian airman all file out of our compartment and the Irish major from Salonica is last. He turns to me with a frank Irish smile: "Your bag can just as well go along with my military luggage. And they'll never even open it."

At eight o'clock that night in Havre, my passport and the letter from the French consul in New York are handed down the steel line of ten men at a table. Each looks up with the same curious smile when his