“I’m quite used to it now!” Lucy insisted, not realizing the absurdity of her words in her longing to reassure her father’s keenly suffering mind. “And Elizabeth is here, you know—she will take care of me.”
“Yes—how thankful I am for that,” said Colonel Gordon quickly.
“Here comes Major Greyson, so I’ll leave you,” said Lucy, rising from her place as the surgeon entered for his morning visit. “I’ll go and get my breakfast.”
In the little dining-room she found Elizabeth setting the table with plates and spoons. The sight was such a reminder of breakfast-time on Governor’s Island that, forgetting all her repugnance to Elizabeth’s German sympathies, she threw her arms around her old nurse’s thin, little shoulders, and gave her a hug for a morning greeting. Elizabeth turned a delighted face toward her, exclaiming:
“Good-morning, dear Miss Lucy! How early you are up! Come, in this chair sit, and I will get you the best I can.”
It seemed very pleasant to sit down and be waited on by Elizabeth’s deft fingers, but the strangeness of her being there had not yet passed from Lucy’s mind and she said, wistfully, “Oh, Elizabeth, if we were only back at home. Father and Mother and Bob and William and you and I. Wouldn’t it be great?”
“That will come again, Miss Lucy,” suggested Elizabeth hopefully. But Lucy, unable to say frankly, “Not while there are enough Germans left alive to fight,” lifted a spoonful of weak cocoa to her lips in silence.
“And William—how he is?” asked Elizabeth, stopping her work to make the inquiry with eager affection in her eyes.
“He is well, and, thank goodness, safe at home,” sighed Lucy, seeing again before her the forlorn, stumbling little children of the refugees from Château-Plessis.
Miss Pearse came in presently and joined her, famished after an hour’s hard work. “I have a job all ready for you, Lucy,” she said, when she had taken a sip of hot coffee and eaten a piece of black bread. “It is a tiresome one, but very necessary.”