He had no idea that as Belinda Melnotte passed on so swiftly—a delightful bit of color to his eyes in the sun-drenched street—she pulled close her veil across her face to hide the tears. Suddenly the world seemed a sad place to her again. All the exhilaration of her success before the examination board was gone.
She went home to Aunt Roberta in a very serious frame of mind and mentioned only casually her meeting with Frank Sanderson.
The next few days were such busy ones for Belinda that she had little time for moping. She had entered upon a career that promised to fill both her mind and heart.
She had gained at least six months in advancement by joining the French Red Cross and earning a commission. Otherwise she would have been obliged to serve a term at a base hospital. Now, in two days, she was ordered away. Just where she was going she did not know. It was "somewhere in France."
Aunt Roberta wept a little over her when she learned her niece was really going. But she soon dried her eyes and went back to her everlasting cleaning of the apartment. The little woman would never be satisfied until she had these rooms in the gloomy old hotel as spick and span as the ones she had left in New York. Besides, work takes one's mind off one's afflictions.
CHAPTER IX
FIRST EXPERIENCES
The train rolled on staggeringly. Berth cars had long since been removed from all military trains as being too cumbersome. The exigencies of the situation demanded that comfort and luxuries be sacrificed to a desire to move men—many men—quickly. The gay but strangely practical French more quickly adjusted themselves to the intensely serious fact that the party which endured most was destined to win the war.
It was a strictly military train on which Belinda Melnotte traveled. She was an atom in the Military Department of the French Republic; so why should she not be jounced about on a hard seat as well as the soldiers traveling to the trenches? She was to halt short of the trenches; just how short she did not know.
Her uniform was quite as distinctive as that of the soldiers themselves. Nor could the cross on her cap and breast be mistaken. These marks of her service won the girl a good deal of attention.