Later, near “the pool of truth” not far from the “Farmhouse with the Blue Front Door,” Eugenia Peabody again meets Captain Henri Castaigne, the young French officer whom she had once nursed back to health. A short time afterwards he and Eugenia are married.
Later the three other American Red Cross girls decide to continue their nursing of the wounded soldiers of the Allied armies in far-off Russia.
One cold October afternoon three American girls were standing in the stone courtyard of a great Russian fortress near the border line of Poland.
Situated upon a cone-shaped hill, the fort itself had been built like the three sides of a square, with the yard as the center. Along the fourth side ran a cement wall with a single iron gate.
Evidently the three girls were engaged in Red Cross work, for they wore the familiar service uniforms. One of them had on a heavy coat and cap, but the other two must have just come out of doors for a few moments.
Indeed, their first words revealed this fact.
“I really don’t feel that you should be starting upon this expedition alone, Nona,” Mildred Thornton argued. She was a tall girl, with heavy, flaxen hair and quiet, steel-gray eyes. She was gazing anxiously about her, for Russia was a new and strange world to the three American Red Cross nurses, who had arrived at their present headquarters only a few weeks before.
Nearly a year had passed since the four friends separated in Belgium. Then Mildred and Nona Davis had remained at their posts to care for the homeless Belgian children, while Barbara Meade and Eugenia Peabody returned to southern France.
Now at the close of Mildred Thornton’s speech to Nona, Barbara Meade frowned. She was poised on one foot as if expecting to flee at any moment.
“I quite agree with you, Mildred,” she protested. “Nona’s message was far too mysterious and vague to consider answering. We must not forget that we are now in a country and among a people whom we don’t understand in the least. Besides, I promised both Dick and Eugenia that we would be more careful. How I wish one or the other of them were here to advise us!”