“Are you suffering again?” she asked gently. “I am so sorry; I thought you were almost well.”
“It isn’t that,” the boy whispered. “I wouldn’t mind the pain; it’s only—oh, I might as well say it, I want my mother. Funny to behave like a cry-baby. I wish I could sleep. I wonder if you could sing to me?”
At first Nona shook her head. “Why I can’t sing, really,” she returned. “I have never had a music lesson in my life. I only know two or three songs that I used to sing to my father way down in South Carolina. I expect you hardly know there is such a place.”
Then suddenly the boy’s disappointed face made the girl hesitate.
She glanced about them. In the bed next to the boy’s the man she and Barbara had rescued from the aeroplane disaster lay apparently too deeply absorbed in a bundle of newspapers to pay the least attention to them.
By this time he had almost recovered and was enormously impatient to return to his regiment. It appeared that he was not a regular member of the aviation corps, but a colonel in command of one of the crack line regiments. However, he happened also to be a skilled aviator and on the morning of the accident, having a leave of absence from his command, had gone up to reconnoiter over the enemy’s lines.
No, Colonel Dalton would pay no attention to her, Nona felt convinced. He was very quiet and stern and a distinguished soldier, so that most of the nurses were afraid of him.
“If you’ll try to sleep, why I’ll sing softly just to you, so we need not disturb any one else,” Nona murmured, kneeling down by the side of the boy’s cot so that her face was not far from his. “I only know some old darkey songs.”
Straightway the young English boy closed his eyes. Very quietly in a hushed voice Nona began to sing, believing no one else would listen.
She chanced to be kneeling just under one of the tall windows and the afternoon sun shone down upon her white cap, her pale gold hair and delicate face. If she had known it she was not unlike a little nun, but fortunately Nona had no thought of herself.