“The best medicine she brings us,” said one of the wounded men, one day, “is her laugh.” And yet Evelyn rarely laughed at all. It was her ever present smile and the general joyousness of her countenance that the invalids interpreted as laughter.
She always carried a light shot-gun with her, and she rarely returned to the “gre’t house” without three or four squirrels for her own and Dorothy’s dinner. Now and then she filled her bag with partridges—or “quails,” as those most toothsome of game birds are generally, and quite improperly, called at the North. When September came, she got an occasional wild turkey also, her skill both in finding game and in the use of her gun being unusually good.
One day Dorothy challenged her on this point.
“You are a sentimentalist on the subject of animals,” she said, “and yet you are a huntswoman.”
“But why not?” asked Evelyn, in astonishment at the implied question. “In the summer, the wild creatures multiply enormously. When the winter comes, they starve to death because there is not food enough. In the fall, the woods are full of them; in the spring, there are very few. Nine tenths of them must die in any case, and if my gun hastens the death of one, it betters the chance of another to survive. I could never deceive them, or persuade them to trust me and then betray their trust. I don’t think I am a sentimentalist, Dorothy, and—”
Just then Dorothy thought of something else and said it, and the conversation was diverted into other channels.
Nearly always Evelyn had a book with her, which she read at odd moments, and quite always she had one book or more lying around the house, each open at the place at which she had last read, and each lying ready to her hand whenever a moment of leisure should come in her very busy day. For besides her attendance upon the sick, she relieved Dorothy of the greater part of her household duties, and was tireless in her work in the laboratory. Her knowledge of chemistry was scant, of course, but she had quickly and completely mastered the processes in use in the laboratory, and her skill in drug manufacture was greater than that of many persons more familiar with the technical part of that work.
She had from the first taken exclusive care of her own room, peremptorily ordering all the maids to keep out of it.
“A maid always reminds me,” she said to Dorothy, by way of offering an explanation that did not explain; for she did not complete her sentence. But so earnest was her objection that, even to the daily polishing of the white ash floor with a pine needle rubbing, she did everything within those precincts with her own hands.