It was long after the midnight hour in the dimly lighted wards of the field hospital back of the English battle line at Ypres, and pretty, white-capped Nydia, the nurse best beloved by the wounded soldiers—Nydia, with the face of a Madonna and voice as soft and soothing as that of a mother crooning a lullaby to a sleeping babe—was flitting about among the cots, adjusting a bandage or pillow here, and giving a swallow of water or medicine there, and doing everything possible for the comfort of her charges.
There was something of a mystery about Nydia. Nobody knew her history or antecedents. She had appeared at the hospital and proffered her services at a time when they were badly needed, and the medical staff had accepted the offer and set her at work without further questioning or investigation.
From the first Nydia was very popular with the patients to whom she ministered; far more so than she was with the grim-visaged surgeon-general in charge of the field hospital. Said he one day to his assistant:
“This angel-faced nurse we’ve taken on lately may mean well, but I am afraid she is a bit careless. Altogether too many of her patients are dropping off—er—unexpectedly. I’ll have to look into the matter.”
Which he did—later on—but that, as Kipling says, is another story.
Return we now to Nydia on her nightly rounds.
She pauses at the cot of a stalwart young English captain who is suffering from a gunshot wound received a few days before, and bends over him with a look of anxious solicitude on her face.
“How is the pain to-night, my captain?” she asks, in a low, sweet voice like a caress.
“Bad, bad,” he replies slowly. “But I can stand it, dear, so long as I have you for a nurse. Just think! Only a week since you first came to my cot side, and already I love——”
“Hush! my brave captain,” she breaks in on his rhapsody. “You must not think of such things when you are suffering so from your wound. It will be time enough for that to-morrow. To-night you must sleep. I must use the needle to quiet your pain.”