She may not have had the training of the other three American Red Cross girls, but she had practical experience and the nursing instinct.
With skill and with gentleness and without a word she now slipped her bare white arm under the stranger’s shoulders and gradually drew him back into a comfortable position. Then she took her arm away again, but continued to kneel on the corner of his rug waiting to see if there were to be any signs of faintness.
There were none. Without appearing surprised or even thanking her, the young Englishman continued his fantastic conversation.
“We have turned American girls into Princesses in Europe quite an extraordinary number of times. I have wondered sometimes how they liked it, since I have been told they are all queens in their own land.”
Then observing that his companion considered his remarks degenerating into foolishness, he groped about until his hand touched the book he desired.
“Forgive my nonsense,” he urged penitently. “You can put it down to the fact that I have actually been reading Andersen’s Fairy Tales half the afternoon. I have grown so terribly bored with everything for the past six weeks while I have been trying to get this confounded leg well enough to go back and join my regiment.”
He offered the little book to Nona, and almost instinctively, as the wind scattered the pages, she glanced down upon the front leaf to discover her companion’s name. There it was written in an unformed handwriting. “Robert Hume, from Mother Susan.”
“Robert Hume,” Nona repeated the name to herself mentally without lifting her eyes. It was a fine name, and yet it had a kind of middle class English sound like George Eliot, or Charles Dickens. Nona realized that what is known in English society as the middle class had produced most of England’s greatness. Nevertheless it was surprising to find the son of a gardener possessed of so much intelligence.
He even pretended not to have noticed that she had endeavored to discover his name.
She put the book on the ground and got up on her feet again.