He had therefore brought Lieutenant Martin directly to the American hospital, which happened to be closer to them than the village. There, Madame Castaigne had herself received him and he had left his injured friend and officer in her charge.
The doctor at first reported that neither of the young officer’s wounds was particularly serious and that it was only a question of a few weeks before Martin’s recovery. But the young man was found to be overworked and overstrained, with his vitality lower than anyone could have imagined from his appearance. So the few weeks had already passed.
Late one afternoon Nona came quietly into Lieutenant Martin’s room, a private room, as the hospital was still uncrowded and he had been found to be an exceptionally nervous patient.
Nona had been off duty all day and as she had passed the other nurse, Agatha Burton, in the hall the moment before, she discovered him alone.
The young man was propped up on pillows, with the bandage still about his head and his arm in a sling. Yet somehow Nona did not feel that either of these misfortunes warranted the expression she observed on his face.
He had rather a thin face always and now the skin was drawn tightly over his fine, slightly arched nose and the prominent bones of his cheeks. His gray eyes, which looked darker since his illness, were sunken and his hair pushed carelessly back showed the best of him, a high, pure forehead, unlined and white as a girl’s. Yet he seemed wretched and miserable and Nona heard his sigh deepen into a groan as she came nearer his bed.
“I don’t see how you could have left me alone so long suffering like this. It’s been, oh, it’s been Hades!”
“You are not worse, are you?” Nona asked, “and you can’t have been alone long, because I saw Miss Burton just leaving your room and Madame Castaigne told me she had seen you a short time ago.” Lieutenant Martin made no answer, while Nona adjusted his pillow and then moved to open a blind so that he could see the yellow lights of the sun casting the last of the day’s glory over the nearby valley of France.
“I thought nurses were not supposed to argue with patients,” Lieutenant Martin murmured irritably and then in a little different tone, “But thank you for raising that shade without asking me if I wished it. The sunrise and the sunset are about all the beauty I ever see these days, except—the truth is that Miss Burton has asked me so many questions in the last few hours that if she had not gone just when she did there would have been another outburst. And did Madame Castaigne tell you that she scolded me as if I had been about six years old and without the least regard for my being a First Lieutenant, with a fair chance of a captaincy, until this blasted accident? She assured me that if I was not more considerate of the nurses—well, I suppose I was not to be allowed to have one, I was not quite certain what my punishment was to be. But that same Miss Burton seems to have shed tears over something she thinks I said to her. But I am sure I have never been inconsiderate, although I don’t like Miss Burton. She gives me the creeps; for one thing, she won’t fight back. I have never been disagreeable to you, Miss Davis.”
Nona laughed. “How are the mighty fallen!” she thought a trifle wickedly to herself. But aloud she answered. “Oh, not especially; besides, I don’t pay any attention to what men say when they are ill. They are scarcely responsible. Besides, your illness must have been particularly hard on you, shut up all these weeks with women and girls when all your interest and thought are with our soldiers. Even though we did not know each other very well when we were younger, I remember you had the reputation of being immensely scornful of girls.”