After having found my cabin and seen to my belongings I hobbled up on deck once more, to verify my vision of the Canadian nurse’s uniform. I discovered the uniform in two or three instances, but in none that corresponded to the figure too little to be tall and too tall to be considered little I had watched receding down the deck.
As for the costume itself, it was not difficult to find myself beside one of the ladies who wore it—a beautiful, grave woman, of the type of Bouguereau’s Consolatrice, who, with hands resting on the deck rail, was looking down at the movement on the dock.
“There seem to be a number of nurses going back,” I observed, after an introductory word or two.
“There are three in our party—myself and the two over there.”
The two over there were two I had already seen, neither of them being my pilot of a half-hour previously.
“I thought I saw another,” I threw off, casually.
“I believe there is one—an American girl from Lady Rideover’s hospital at Taplow.”
As I had just come from Lady Rideover’s hospital at Taplow, and Lady Rideover herself was my sister, I suggested, without mentioning the relationship, that in this speculation there was some mistake.
“She may not have come directly from there,” the Consolatrice admitted; “but I know she was with Lady Rideover six months ago.”
“But six months ago I was with Lady Rideover myself.”