“I would not have you doubt my friend. I cannot explain to you, and yet I wish to warn you. Do not be too intimate with Sonya Valesky. Russia is not like other countries in times of war or peace. She has many problems, tragedies of her own to overcome which the foreigner cannot understand. Forgive me if I should not have spoken.”
Then before either girl could fully grasp what the young man’s confused speech could mean, he had bowed, mounted his horse and ridden off.
CHAPTER V
Out of the Past
BUT circumstances afterwards made it impossible for Nona Davis to follow the young Russian officer’s advice.
A week went by at the hospital without a decision on the girl’s part and without another word from her former friend. Sonya Valesky she must remember was her Russian name. A beautiful name and somehow it seemed to fit the personality of the woman whom Nona at once admired and distrusted. For the name carried with it its own suggestion of beauty and of melancholy. What secret could Sonya Valesky be concealing that forced even her friends to warn others against her?
Of course there could be no answer in her own consciousness to this puzzle, yet Nona kept the problem at the back of her mind during the following week of strenuous work. Nursing inside the bleak fortress at Grovno was of a more difficult character than any work the three American Red Cross girls had yet undertaken. The surroundings were so uncomfortable, the nursing supplies so limited. Worse than anything else, an atmosphere of almost tragic suspense hung like a palpable cloud over every inmate of the fort.
Authentic news was difficult to obtain, yet refugees were constantly pouring in with stories of fresh German conquests in Poland. For it chanced that the months after the arrival of the three American girls in Russia were among the darkest in Russia’s history during the great war. Military strategists might be able to understand why the Grand Duke Nicholas and his army were giving way before almost every furious German onslaught. They could explain that he was endeavoring to lead the enemy deeper and deeper into a foreign land, so as to cut them off from their base of supplies. Yet it was hard for the ordinary man and woman or the common soldier to conceive of anything except fresh danger and disaster in each defeat.