“Get back to me, indeed! If you think you are going without me, Andy McLean, you are vastly mistaken. If it is your duty to go help, it is my duty, too. Oh, I know I am no trained nurse, but I can do lots of other things. Dr. Flint says I am better than most trained nurses——”
Nance stopped short. She should not have mentioned Dr. Flint. Only suppose it had hurt Andy’s feelings! Not a bit of it!
“Bully for Flint!” cried the accepted lover. “Oh, Nance, would you go with me?”
“I can scrub and cook and take care of babies.”
“I don’t know about that,” teased Andy.
“But you will always be near and pull them out of the water when I let them fall in,” suggested Nance. “Won’t you?”
“That I will! Just as near as I can get!” and Andy hitched his chair a little closer, thereby disarranging the table even more than he had done before. But although Molly was a very careful housekeeper and most particular about the looks of her table, she cared not one whit, but beamed on Andy as though he were the pink of propriety instead of a naughty boy.
What a change a little lovering had made in the appearance of both Nance and Andy! The girl’s clear skin was flushed and her eyes sparkling. The corners of her mouth had no trace of downward tendency now. The years of sadness and confinement spent in nursing her father and mother were forgotten. Nance had come into her own—her woman’s heritage: to be beloved, to be guarded and cherished; at the same time to know that she was to be the companion, the helpmeet. As for Andy,—he beamed with joy. His face had lost the stern lines that had so distressed his mother. He looked again like the boy he was, not like the tired, disappointed man she had known of late.
Nance had no romantic notions of what life in France meant in that early spring of 1917. She knew that there was no room for drones and unproductive consumers in that war-worn country. She knew that in marrying Andy and going with his unit she was to face work, privations, danger, even death; but with her eyes open she was determined to see it through.
“I would enlist in the United States army,” Andy said to his host after dinner, as they lounged in the den and puffed away at their comforting pipes, “but I feel that I can be of more good right now in France where they are crying out for surgeons.”