Eleanor, sitting low in the car, with her absent eyes fixed on the road ahead, lapsed into a daydream. From an absorbed contemplation of herself and her dramatic career, her mind veered in gratitude to the one who most believed in its possibility. What a friend he had been! Just when she had been ready to give up in despair, he had fanned her dying hope into a glorious blaze that illuminated every waking hour. And it was not only his sympathetic interest in her thwarted ambition that touched her: it was also the fact that he had rescued her from the daily boredom of sitting with elderly ladies making interminable surgical dressings, and by an adroit bit of diplomacy outwitted the family and introduced her as a ward visitor at the camp hospital.
The mere thought of the hospital sent her mind flying off at a tangent. Even the stage gave way for the moment to this new and all-absorbing occupation. Never in her life had she done anything so interesting. The escape from home, the personal contact with all those nice, jolly boys, the excitement of being of service for the first time in her butterfly existence, was intoxicating. She smiled now as she thought of the way Graham's eager head always popped up the moment she entered the door, and of how his face shone when she talked to him. After all, she told herself, there was something thrilling in having hands that had captured a machine-gun laboriously threading tiny beads for her, in having a soldier who had been decorated for courage stammer and blush in her presence.
"Well," said the Captain, who had been lazily observing her, "aren't you about through with your mental monologue?"
Eleanor roused herself with a start.
"Oh, I am sorry! I was thinking about my boys at the hospital. You can't imagine how I hate to leave them!"
The answer was evidently not what the Captain had expected. As long as his company of feminine admirers marched in adoring unison he was indifferent to their existence; but let one miss step and he was instantly on the alert.
"I haven't noticed any tears being shed over leaving me," he said, and the aggrieved note in his voice promptly stirred her humor.
"Why should I mind leaving you? You don't need me."
"How do you know?"
She looked at him scoffingly.