She did not flinch from his glittering grey eye, and her grieved look deepened.
"Is she here? Can I see her?"
"She is not in this building, but I will inform her of your arrival. I have become much interested in her. She is a brilliant, erratic creature, and has a soul! which cannot safely be predicated of all the sex nowadays. Where are you going?"
"Back to Uncle Eric. Will you put me in the same hospital with Electra and Mrs. Campbell?"
"I will put you in a strait-jacket! I promise you that."
Electra was agreeably surprised at the unusual warmth with which Irene received her some hours later, but little suspected why the lips lingered in their pressure of hers, or understood the wistful tenderness of the eyes which dwelt so fondly on her face. The icy wall of reserve had suddenly melted, as if in the breath of an August noon, and dripped silently down among things long past. Russell's name was casually mentioned more than once, and Electra fell asleep that night wholly unconscious that the torn and crumpled pages of her heart had been thoroughly perused by the woman from whom she was most anxious to conceal the truth.
Having engaged a suite of rooms near the hospital, a few days sufficed for preliminary arrangements, and Irene was installed in a ward of the building to which she had requested Dr. Arnold to appoint her.
Thus, by different, by devious thorny paths, two sorrowing women emerged upon the broad highway of Duty, and, clasping hands, pressed forward to the divinely appointed goal—Womanly Usefulness.
Only those who have faithfully ministered in a hospital can fully appreciate the onerous nature of the burdens thus assumed—can realize the crushing anxiety, the sleepless apprehension, the ceaseless tension of brain and nerve, the gnawing, intolerable sickness and aching of heart over sufferings which no human skill can assuage; and the silent blistering tears which are shed over corpses of men whose families kneel in far distant homes, praying God's mercy on dear ones lying at that moment stark and cold on hospital cots with strangers' hands about the loved limbs.
Day by day, week after week, those tireless women-watchers walked the painful round from patient to patient, administering food and medicine to diseased bodies, and words of hope and encouragement to souls, who shrank not from the glare and roar and carnage of battle, but shivered and cowered before the daring images which deathless memory called from the peaceful, happy Past. It was not wonderful that the home-sick sufferers regarded them with emotions which trenched on adoration, or that often, when the pale thin faces lighted with a smile of joy at their approach, Irene and Electra felt that they had a priceless reward.