"D'you like me, George?" she asked.
"Not when you're looking like this. Now I only want to slap you and send you to bed. Will you go to your doctor?"
"If you like, I'll say that I'm going to him——" she began.
"That's all I want," he interrupted. "If you gave a promise, however extravagant, I should know that you'd always keep it."
She raised her eyes to his and looked swiftly away.
On the day after her return to the Abbey, the hospital was filled with rumour and gossip. No new cases were to be taken; and, as soon as the last bed was empty, commandant and doctors, nurses and orderlies were to be transferred to the new government hospital at Sunbury. Lady Crawleigh came down without warning to arrange for the reconversion of the house. In the middle of the afternoon she went into Barbara's room to find her with drooping mouth and wet eyes, crying in her sleep. The commandant was flushed from her office and invited to explain; without waiting for the hospital to be closed, Barbara was personally conducted to London and sent under the care of Lord Crawleigh's sister to the sea. She made no resistance; she did not even tell her parents that she was twenty-one and that she refused to be ordered about. She seemed no longer to matter either to herself or to any one else....
Before coming off duty for the last time, she said good-bye to each of her patients and found herself presented at the first bed with a pendant.
"We had to get it in rather a hurry," explained the spokesman. "But we hope you'll like it. We all wish you weren't going, Lady Barbara. It's not worth being in hospital without you."
"You dears, I wish I wasn't going," Barbara cried with a quaver in her voice. "Good-bye, and bless you all! No, I won't let you kiss my hand! I'll kiss yours."
She walked from bed to bed, smiling until she reached the door; then her composure deserted her, and she ran out crying. It was her fate to make people fall in love with her, whether she tried or not—her fate, too, never to be in love with any one herself. Jim, of course, would have called this another experiment in emotion; he would have been very scornful about the presentation and her tearful farewell, reminding her that Florence Nightingale, her great prototype, had her shadow kissed, as she passed down the ward. And next day, as she might almost have foreseen, there were photographs of her in uniform: "Lady Barbara Neave, who has been doing splendid war-work at Lady Crawleigh's hospital in Hampshire." For the first time in her life she wanted to be left alone and unnoticed, so that she could get into a train or walk about in London without being recognized.