Eugenia was growing sleepy; she had such a little while to rest that she was forgetting to be tactful.
“Whether you wish to go back home or not, Barbara, I’m afraid you must if you won’t undertake this ambulance work. The Superintendent says she likes you very much and all that, but really does not feel it wise for you to stay on at the hospital. There is so much nursing required and so little room that the girls who cannot give the best kind of service are really in the way. I am sorry to hurt your feelings, but it is better for me to tell you this than any one else,” Eugenia concluded, again made sympathetic by the hurt in the younger girl’s face. Barbara looked so broken and humiliated, so intensely ashamed of her own failure. Nevertheless, Eugenia could not help seeing that even at this minute Barbara suggested a little girl who has been caught in wrongdoing at school. She simply did not seem able to appear like a grown-up person into whose hands life and death could be intrusted.
For ten minutes afterwards Barbara made no reply. But she got up and put on her nurse’s uniform again, hiding her short brown curls beneath her stiff white cap and covering her blue frock with her white apron bearing its cross of red.
Then for a moment when Eugenia seemed to be asleep Barbara dropped on her knees before the open window, gazing out in the direction where she knew the zone of danger and terror lay. Swiftly the girl uttered a prayer for strength and courage. The next moment she crossed over to Eugenia.
“I am going to undertake the ambulance service. I may flunk that too, but at least I can try, and as the book says, ‘angels can do no more.’ And I’m distinctly not an angel.”
CHAPTER XIV
Colonel Dalton
In the meantime Nona was on duty in the convalescent ward. It was the work that she had been able to attend to with peculiar success ever since her arrival at the base hospital. This was a duty which many of the Red Cross nurses liked the least. For the convalescent soldiers were often like spoiled and nervous children. It was amazing how many drinks of water they required, how frequently their pillows had to be turned, how often letters from home had to be read and re-read until the nurses knew them by heart as well as the patients.
It was a dark, cloudy afternoon when Nona entered the big room and before she had more than crossed the threshold she became aware of an atmosphere of gloom and ill-temper.
Daisy Redmond, the English girl with whom they had crossed the Channel, had been in attendance on the ward before Nona’s appearance and she seemed bored and annoyed. She was a very good nurse for an ill person, but too serious and reserved to cheer the convalescent, and on Nona’s entrance she gave a sigh of relief.