And when Mildred turned he still held the envelope in his hand.
“I want to ask you a favor, Miss Thornton, and I don’t know just how to explain. I wonder if you will be good enough to mail this letter of mine from the hospital along with your own home mail? You see, it is like this with the newspaper fellows, all our mail is so censored that the news we want to send to the United States is usually cut out before it arrives. There is no good my writing exactly what the other fellows send. So I thought if you would mail this for me like private mail along with the nurses’ letters, why I’d stand a chance. I know it is asking a good deal of a favor of you. But somehow I have felt you were my friend ever since our first meeting and my mother feels the same way. You see, we are awfully poor. Of course you can’t know what that means, but for my mother’s sake and my own I’m terribly anxious to make good with my war stories. I feel if I can make a reputation now my future will be assured.”
Whether Brooks Curtis was a student of character or not, one does not yet know. But certainly he had gauged Mildred.
If there was anything that did appeal to her it was the thought of another’s struggle and the possibility that she might help. Just because she had always spent such a rich and sheltered life her desire to aid others was the stronger. So Mildred promised to mail the letter to an address in Brooklyn, placing the address on the envelope with her own handwriting so as to avoid questioning.
Neither did she feel that she was doing anything unusual. The deception was too small to be considered. Besides, what difference could it make to the hospital authorities if one more letter were added to their mail bag?
“I shall never cease to appreciate your kindness,” Brooks Curtis said at parting, “and you won’t mind, will you, if now and then Anton brings you other letters to the hospital? I may not be able to get away to bring them myself.”
Mildred nodded without thinking of this side of the question seriously. The truth of the matter was that she was in too much of a hurry now to return to her work. Although she had not gone back to Mère Marie’s for coffee, they had been out longer than she realized.
CHAPTER XVI
The Ambulance Corps
A few days later it was definitely arranged that Nona Davis, Barbara Meade, Lady Dorothy Mathers and Daisy Redmond should be enrolled in the Red Cross ambulance work.