No, Peter Brooks would have been the last person to deny her this chance, and so all was well. She was wondering now if by some rare good luck she might stumble on Peter at the front. She had not seen him since they separated the day after their arrival in France. A few penciled hieroglyphics had come from time to time telling her all was well with him. She had written when she could and when she knew enough of an address to risk a letter reaching him. But Peter, after the manner of all correspondents, was like Hamlet’s ghost—here, there, and gone; and Sheila had no way of knowing if her letters had ever reached him.
For weeks it had seemed to the girl that her love had lain dormant, hushed under the pressure of work. So vital and eternal were both love and happiness that in her zeal for perfect, impersonal service she had thrust them both out of sight, as one might put seeds away in the dark to wait until planting-time, assured of their fulfilment when the time came. But now in the lull between the work at the hospital and the work that would soon claim her again she discovered that in some inexplicable manner love would no longer be shut out. She was sick for the man she loved.
A funny little wistful droop took Sheila’s lips, and her chin quivered for an instant. It was so unlike the girl that the chief, seeing, reached across and laid a hand on her knee.
“What is it? Not sorry?”
“Never. But I was thinking how pleasantly easy it might have been to stay behind at the old San. Peter and I’d be climbing that mythical hilltop of ours, with a home of our own at the end of the climb—if we’d stayed behind.”
“Well, why didn’t you?”
The nurse laughed softly. Griggs volunteered to answer for her.
“Because you were a fool, like a lot of the rest of us.”
“Because—oh, because of that queer something inside us all that pries us away from our determinations just to be contented and happy all our lives and hustles us somewhere to do something for somebody else. Remember in the old fairy-tales they were always cleaning the world of dragons or giants or chimeras before they married and lived happy ever after.”
“Bosh! Remember that it’s only in the fairy-tales that the giants or the monsters don’t generally get you, and you get an epitaph instead of a wedding. You romantic idealists make me sick,” and Griggs snarled openly.