Now the hospital room was in half shadow, but it was never light nor aired as the American nurse felt it should be.
The hospital quarters were only a portion of the fortress, a great room, like a barracks which had been hastily turned into a refuge for the wounded.
The long stone chamber boasted only four small windows hardly larger than portholes and some distance from the ground. These opened with difficulty and were protected by heavy iron bars. But then in Russia in many private houses no window is ever voluntarily opened from autumn until Easter, as the cold is so intense and the arrangements for heating so crude.
Today Mildred wondered if the heavy, sick-laden air was giving her extraordinary fancies. She kept seeing dream pictures. For as she stared about the cold chamber of sorrow she beheld with greater distinctness the image of her own rooms at home.
This was the hour when the maid came to light her yellow-shaded electric candles; then she would put a fresh log on the fire and stir it to brightness, not because the added warmth was needed in their big steam-heated house, but because of the cheerfulness. Then would follow her mother’s invitation to drink a cup of tea with her and Dick in the library, or would she prefer having it served in her own room?
With this thought the girl’s eyes clouded for a moment. Doubtless Dick and her mother would be having tea together this afternoon and Dick would in all probability be trying to explain why his sister was not with him. During her work in France and Belgium her mother and father had been more than kind, but with this suggestion of coming into Russia to continue her nursing both her parents had protested.
It is true that they had not actually demanded her presence at home, for she would not have disobeyed a command. But undoubtedly they had urged her homecoming.
Her father longed for her because of the rare affection between them and the fact that he dreaded the conditions and experiences that might await her and her friends in Russia. For these same reasons her mother also desired her return, yet Mildred knew that there was another motive actuating her mother. She might be unconscious of the fact, but if her daughter should reappear in New York society at the present time, because of her war experiences she would become an object of unusual interest and attention.
At this instant the smile that appeared at the corners of the girl’s mouth banished the tired expression it had previously worn. One big thing her war experiences had done for Mildred Thornton, it had given her a new sense of values. Now she knew the things that counted. She had learned to smile at her own failure as a society girl, even to understand and forgive her mother’s chagrin at the fact.
Yet Mildred was influenced in a measure to continue her work in Europe by these trivial points of view.