Instead, it was resting on something warm, and it was elevated some inches above the grass.

He recalled a war-chromo of a wounded soldier whose head rested on the knee of a Red Cross nurse,--a nurse who sat on the furrowed earth of a five-color battlefield, where all real life army regulations forbade her to set foot.
Was he that soldier?
Was he still in the hell of the Flanders trenches?
He had thought the war was over, and that he was back in America,--in America and on his way South on some odd and perilous business whose nature he could not now recall.
Another few seconds of mental wandering, and he was himself again, his mind functioning more and more clearly.

With returning strength of brain came curiosity.

Where was he?
How did he chance to be lying here, his head in some sobbing woman's lap?
It didn't make sense! With instinctive caution, he parted his eyelids, ever so slightly, and sought to peer upward through his thick lashes.
The effort was painful, but less so than he had feared.
Already, through natural buoyancy or else by reason of the unseen nurse's ministrations, the throbbing ache was becoming almost bearable.
At first, his dazed eyes could make out nothing.

Then he could see, through his lashes, the velvety dark blue of the night sky and the big white Southern stars shining through a soft cloud.