Chapter V: The Last of the Surgical

Things have a way of beginning casually, so casually that you think they are bound to spin themselves out into airy nothings. The first inkling you have to the contrary is that headlong plunge into one of the big moments of your life, perhaps the biggest. But you never cease to wonder at the innocent, inconsequential way it began. These are the moments when you can picture Fate, sitting like an omnipotent operator before some giant switchboard, playing with signals and the like. I dare say he grins like a mischievous little boy who delights in turning things topsy-turvy whenever he has a chance.

Fate had been busy at this for some time when the sanitarium, quite oblivious of any signal connection, set itself to the glorious business of getting Sheila O'Leary married. Grief, despair, disappointment came often to the San, death not infrequently, but happiness rarely, and there had never before been such a joyous, personal happiness as this one. Small wonder that the San should gather it close to its heart and gloat over it! Was not Sheila one of its very own, born under its portals, trained in its school, placed above all its nurses, and loved beyond all else? And Peter Brooks. Had not the San given him his life and Sheila? It certainly was a time for rejoicing. As Hennessy had voiced it:

"Sure, half the weddin's ye go to ye sit miserable, thinkin' the man isn't good enough for the lass, or the lass is no mate for the man. But, glory be to Pether! here's a weddin' at last that God Almighty might be cryin' the banns for."

They were to be married within the month. Every one was agreed to this, from the superintendent down to Flanders, the bus-driver--yes, and even the lovers themselves. The San forgot its aches and sorrows in the excitement of planning an early summer wedding.

"We'll make the chapel look lovely," chirped the Reverend Mrs. Grumble, clasping and unclasping her hands in a fidget of anticipation. "There'll be enough roses and madonna lilies in the gardens to bank every pew and make an arch over the chancel."

"Well, if Leerie's married in the chapel, half of us can't get in." And Madam Courot shook her head in emphatic disapproval. "She'd better take the Congregational church. That's the only place large enough to hold everybody who will want to come."

A mutinous murmur rose and circled the patients on the veranda. Not married at the San! It was unthinkable. So this point and the final date Sheila settled for them.

"We'll have the wedding in the gardens, save all the fuss and waste of picking the flowers, be ever so much prettier, and everybody and his neighbor can come."

When Hennessy heard of it he shirred his mouth into a pucker and whistled ecstatically. "'Tis like her, just! Married out-o'-doors wi' the growin' things to stand up wi' her and the blessed sun on her head. Faith, Hennessy will have to be scrubbin' up the swans an' puttin' white satin bows round their necks."

Sheila chose the hour before sunset on an early day of June, and the San speedily set itself to the task of praying off the rain and arranging the delightful details of attendants, refreshments, music, and all the other non-essentials of a successful wedding. Miss Maxwell, the superintendent of nurses, took the trousseau in hand and portioned out piles of napery and underwear to the eager hands of the nurses to embroider. The whole sanitarium was suddenly metamorphosed into a Dorcas Society; patients forgot to be querulous, and refused extra rubbings and all unnecessary tending, that more stitches might be taken in the twenty-four hours of the hospital day. A great rivalry sprang up between the day and night nurses as to which group would finish the most, and old Mr. Crotchets, the cynical bachelor with liver complaint and a supposedly atrophied heart, offered to the winning shift the biggest box of candy New York could put up.

Through the first days of her happiness Sheila walked like a lambent being of another world, whose radiance was almost blinding. Those who had known her best, who had felt her warmth and beauty in spite of that bitterness which had been her shield against the hurt she had battled with so long, looked upon her now with unfathomable wonder. And Peter, who had worshiped her from the moment she had taken his hand and led him back to the ways of health, watched her as the men of olden times must have watched the goddesses that occasionally graced their earth.

"Beloved, you're almost too wonderful for an every-day, Sunday-edition newspaper-man like me," Peter whispered to her in the hush of one twilight, as they sat together in the rest-house, watching Hennessy feed the swans.

"Every woman is, when the miracle of her life has been wrought for her. Man of mine," and Sheila reached out to Peter's ever waiting arms, "wouldn't God be niggardly not to let me seem beautiful to you now?"

Peter laughed softly. "If you're beautiful now, what will you be when--"

Sheila hushed him. "Listen, Peter, our happiness frightens me, it's so tremendous for just two people--almost more than our share of life. I know I seem foolish, but long ago I made up my mind I should have to do without love and all that goes with it, and now that it has come--sorrow, death, never frightened me, but this does."

"Glad I have the courage for two, then. Look here, Leerie, the more happiness we have the more we can spill over into other lives and the brighter you can burn your lamp for the ones in the dark. This old world needs all the happiness it can get now. So?"

Sheila smiled, satisfied. "You always understand. If I ever write out a prescription for love, I shall make understanding one-third of the dose. Let's go into partnership, Brooks and O'Leary, Distillers and Dispensers of Happiness."

"All right, but the firm's wrong. It's going to be Brooks and Brooks," and Peter kissed her.

"There is one thing," and Sheila gently disentangled herself. "There are days and days before the wedding, and if everybody thinks I am going to do nothing until then, everybody is very much mistaken. I'm going in this minute to sign up for my last case in the Surgical."

It must have been just at this moment that Fate turned on an arbitrary signal-light and changed a switch. I should like to think that back of his grin lurked a tiny shadow of contrition.

"And what am I going to do?" Peter called dolefully after her.

"Oh, I don't know. You might write an article on the dangers and uncertainties of marrying any woman in a profession." And she blew him a farewell kiss.

The train from the city, that night, brought a handful of patients, and one of these wore the uniform and insignia of a lieutenant of the Engineers. His mother came with him. She had been an old patient, and because of extraordinary circumstances--I use the government term--she had obtained his discharge from a military hospital and had brought him to the San to mend.

"The wounds are slow in closing, and there's some nervous trouble," Miss Maxwell explained to Sheila. "The boy's face is rather tragic. Will you take the case?"

She accepted with her usual curt nod and a hasty departure for her uniform. A half-hour later she was back in the Surgical, her fear as well as her happiness forgotten in the call of another human being in distress. The superintendent of nurses was right: the boy's face was tragic, and a frail little mother hovered over him as if she would breathe into his lungs the last breath from her own. She looked up wistfully, a little fearsomely, as Sheila entered; then a smile of thanksgiving swept her face like a flash of sunlight.

"Oh, I'm so glad! I remember you well. I hoped--but it hardly seemed possible--I didn't dare really to expect it. When I was here before, you were always so needed, and my boy--of course there is nothing serious--only--" and the shaking voice ended as incoherently as it had begun.

The nurse took the withered hands held out to her in her young, warm ones. In an instant she saw all that the little mother had been through--the renunciation months before when she had given her boy up to his country; the long, weary weeks of learning to do without him; the schooling it had taken to grow patient, waiting for the letters that came sparingly or not at all; and at last the news that he was at the front, under fire, when the papers published all the news there was to be told. Sheila saw it all, even to her blind, frantic groping for the God she had only half known and into whose hands she had never wholly given the keeping of her loved ones. And after that the cable and the waiting for what was left of her boy to come home to her. As she looked down at her, Sheila had the strange feeling that this frail little mother was dividing the care of her boy between God and herself, and she smiled unconsciously at this new partnership.

Gently she laid her hand on the lean, brown one resting on the coverlet; the boy opened his eyes. "It's going to be fine to have a soldier for a patient; I expect you know how to obey orders. You are our first, and we're going to make your getting well just the happiest time in all your life, the little mother and I."

The boy made no response. He looked at his mother as if he understood, and then with a groan of utter misery he turned away his head and closed his eyes again. "Ah-h-h!" thought Sheila, and a little later she drew the mother into the corridor beyond earshot.

"There's something ailing him besides wounds. What is it?"

"Clarisse." The promptness of the answer brought considerable relief to the nurse. It was easy to deal with the things one knew; it was the hidden things, tucked away in the corners of the subconscious mind or the super-sensitive soul, that never saw the light of open confession, that were the baffling obstacles to nursing. Sheila never dreaded what she knew.

"Well, what's the matter with Clarisse?" she asked, cheerfully.

The little mother hesitated. Evidently it was hard to put it into words. "They're engaged, she and Phil, and Phil doesn't want to see her, shrinks from the very thought of it. That's what's keeping him from getting better, I think. She's very young and oh, so pretty. They were both young when Phil went away--but Phil--" She stopped and passed a fluttering hand across her forehead; her lips quivered the barest bit. "Phil has come back so old. That's what war does for our boys; in just a few months it turns them into old men, the serious ones--and their eyes are older than any living person's I ever saw."

"And Clarisse is still young. I think I understand."

"That's why I brought him here. In the city there would have been no reason for her not coming to the hospital, but she couldn't come here unless we sent for her--could she?" Again the fluttering hand groped as if to untangle the complexity of thoughts and feelings in the poor confused head. "I write her letters. I make them just as pleasant as I can. I don't want to hurt her; she's so young."

Sheila nodded. "Does he love her?" That was the most important, for to Sheila love was the key that could spring the lock of every barrier.

"He did, and I think she loves him--I think--"

Sheila went back to her patient and began the welding of a comradeship that only such a woman can weld when her heart is full with love for another man. Day by day she made him talk more. He told her of his soldiering; apparently everything that had happened before held little or no place in his scheme of life, and he told it as simply and directly as if he had been a child. He made her see the months of training in camp, when he grew to know his company and feel for the first time what the brotherhood of arms meant. He told of the excitement of departure, the spiritual thrill of marching forth to war with the heart of a crusader in every boy's breast. His eyes shone when he spoke of their renunciation, of the glory of putting behind them home and love until the world should be made clean again and fit for happiness.

Sheila winced at this, but the boy did not notice; he was too absorbed in the things he had to tell.

He told of the days of waiting in France, with the battle-front before them like a mammoth drop-curtain, screening the biggest drama their lives would ever know. "There we were, marking time with the big guns, wondering if our turn would come next. That was a glorious feeling, worth all that came afterward--when the curtain went up for us."

He raised himself on an elbow and looked into Sheila's cool, gray eyes with eyes that burned of battle. "God! I can't tell you about it. There have been millions of war books written by men who have seen more than I have and who have the trick of words--and you've probably read them; you know. Only reading isn't seeing it; it isn't _living it_." He turned quickly, shooting out a hand and gripping hers hard. "Tell me; you've seen all sorts of operations--horrible ones, where they take out great pieces of malignant stuff that is eating the life out of a man. You've seen that?"

The nurse nodded.

"Did you forget it afterward, when the body was clean and whole again? Could you forget the thing that had been there? For that's war. That's what we're fighting, the thing that's eating into the heart of a decent, sound world, and since I've seen the horror of it I can't forget. I can't see the healing--yet."

"You will. Not at first, perhaps, but when you're stronger. That is one of God's blessed plans: He made beauty to be immortal and ugliness to die and be forgotten. And even the scars where ugliness was time whitens and obliterates. Give time its chance."

It was the next day that the boy spoke of Clarisse. "Will time make them all right, too? Leerie," he had picked up the nickname from the other nurses and appropriated it with all the ardent affection of worshiping youth, "we're miles--ages--apart. Can anything under God's canopy bring us together, I wonder?"

"Perhaps." Sheila smiled her old inscrutable smile. "Tell me more."

And so he told her of the girl who was so young, and oh, so pretty. It had all seemed right before he had gone to camp; it was the great love for him, something that had made his going seem the worthier. But at camp the distance between them had begun to widen, her letters had failed to bridge it, and through those letters he had discovered a new angle of her, an angle so acute that it had cut straight to the heart and destroyed all the love that had been there. At least that was what he thought.

"I knew she was young, of course, not much more than a child, and I knew she loved fun and good times, and all that, but--Why, she'd write about week-end parties, and how becoming her bathing-suit was, and what Tommy Flint said about her fox-trotting. Lord!" He writhed under the coverlet and ground his nails into his palms. "We marched through places where there wasn't a shred of anything left for anybody. We saw old women hanging on to broken platters and empty bird-cages because it was all they had left--home, children, everything gone. And on top of that would come a letter telling how much she'd spent on an evening gown, and how Bob Wylie took them out to Riverdale and blew in a hundred and twenty dollars on the day's trip. A hundred and twenty dollars! That would have bought a young ocean of milk over there for the refugee kids I saw starving."

He jerked himself up suddenly and sat huddled over, his eyes kindling with a vision of purging the world. Sheila knew it was useless to stop him, so she propped him up with pillows and let him go on.

"And that wasn't all. Between the lulls in the fighting they moved us along to a quiet sector, to freshen up, where we were so close to the German side that we could look into one of their captured villages. There we could see the French girls they'd carried off going out to work, saw them corralled at night like--" He broke off, hesitated, then went doggedly on. "With field-glasses we could see them plainly, the loads they had to lift and carry, the beatings they got, the look in their faces. Their shoulders were crooked, their backs bent from the long slaving. They were wraiths, most of them--and some with babies at their breasts. After I got back from seeing that, I found another letter from Clarisse. She said the girls just couldn't buckle down to much Red Cross work; it was so hard to do anything much in summer. They'd no sooner get started than some one would say tennis or a swim. _And I saw women dying over there--and bearing Boche babies!_"

All the agony of soul that youth can compass was poured forth in those last words. The boy leaned back on his pillows, weary unto death with the hopelessness of it all. So Sheila let him lie for a while before she answered him.

"Do the boys want their girls to know the full horror of it all? I thought that was one of the things you were fighting for, to keep as much of it away from them as you could."

The boy raised a hand in protest, but Sheila silenced him. "Wait a minute; it's my turn to talk now. I know what's in your mind. You think that Clarisse--and the girls like her--are showing unforgivable callousness and flippancy in the face of this world tragedy. Instead of becoming women as you have become men, they stay silly, unthinking, irresponsible creatures who dance and play and laugh while you fight and die. The contrast is too colossal; it all seems past remedy. Isn't that so? Well, there's another side, a side you haven't thought of. The girls are giving you up. The little they know of life, as it is now, looks very overwhelming to them. Perhaps it frightens them. And what do frightened children do in the dark?"

The boy did not try to answer; he waited, tensely eager.

"Why, they sing; they laugh little short-breathed laughs; they tell stories to themselves of nonsensical things to reassure them. All the time they are trying not to think of what terrors the dark may hold; they are trying not to cry out for some one to come and sit with them. Some of our girls are doing a tremendous work. They meet trains at all hours of the day or night and feed the boys before they sail; they wait all day in the canteens until they're ready to drop; they put in a lot more time, making comfort-kits, knitting, and rolling bandages, than they ever own to. And suppose they don't grow dreadfully serious; isn't it better that way? The girls are doing their bit as fast as they are learning how. It isn't fair of the boys to judge them too soon. It isn't fair of you to judge your Clarisse without giving her a chance."

"You didn't read those letters."

"Letters! Most of us, when we write, keep back the things that really matter and skim off the surface of our lives to tell about. There may not be the sixteenth part of your girl in those letters."

The boy's lips tightened stubbornly. "It wasn't just one--it was all of them. Anyhow, I haven't the nerve or the heart to find out."

Again Sheila let the silence fall between them. When she spoke, her voice was very tender. "Tell me, boy, what made you love her?"

He smiled sheepishly. "Oh, I don't know. She was always a good sport, never got grumpy over things that happened, never got cold feet, either. She had a way of teasing you to do what she wanted, would do anything to get her way; and then she'd turn about so quickly and give you your way, after all--just make you take it. And she'd be so awfully sweet about it, too. And she'd always play fair, and she had a way of making you feel the best ever. Oh, I don't know--" The boy looked about him helplessly. "They sound awfully foolish reasons for loving a girl."

Sheila's face had become suddenly radiant; her eyes sparkled like rushlights in a wind. They actually startled the boy so that he straightened up in bed again and gripped her hand. "I say, Leerie, what is it? I never saw you look like this before. You're--Are you in love?"

"With one of the finest men God ever made. He's so fine that he trusted me through a terrible bungle--believed in the real woman in me when I would have denied it. That's what a man's love can do for a woman sometimes, keep her true to the best in her."

That night, after many fluttering protests, the little mother wrote a letter to Clarisse. It was dictated by Sheila and posted by her, and it contained little information except what might have been extracted from a non-committal railroad guide. It did mention at the last, however, that Phil was slowly gaining.

With this off her mind, Sheila went to find Peter. She had characteristically neglected him since she had been on the case, and as characteristically he made no protest. Instead he met her with that quick understanding that she had claimed as one of love's ingredients. He looked her over well and proudly, then tapped his head significantly.

"I see, there's more to this soldier-boy case than just wounds. Want me to run you down the boulevard while you work it out?"

"Thank God for a man!" breathed Sheila, and then aloud: "No, it's worked out. But you might run me down, just the same."

"Feels almost like frost to-night," said Peter as he put the car into first. "Do you think it will hold pleasant enough for--"

"For what?" Sheila's tone sounded blank.

Peter chuckled. "For the gardens and the old ladies, of course. Have you by any chance forgotten that there's going to be a wedding in four days?"

"Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday--" counted Sheila. "Why, so it is!" Then she echoed Peter's chuckle, "Oh yes, there's going to be a wedding, a beautiful wedding in four days."

A strange little twinge took Peter's heart there in the dark at the queer, impersonal note in what she had said. What did it mean?

Sheila gave the girl twenty-four hours to reach the San after receiving the letter; she came in eighteen, and the nurse rejoiced at this good omen. She had delegated Peter to meet all trains that day, take the girl to her room, send for her at once, and tell nobody. Peter obeyed, and early in the afternoon Sheila looked up from her reading to the boy to see Peter standing in the doorway, the message on his lips.

"Baggage delivered," was Peter's announcement.

"Thank you. I'll come in a minute and see if my key fits." She hunted up the little mother, left her in charge, and hurried over to the nurses' home.

There in the big living-hall, perched in a wicker chair under the poster of Old King Cole, Sheila found the girl, who was young and oh, so pretty. She looked about as capable of taking a plunge into the grim depths of life and coming out safely as a toy Pom of weathering the waters of the Devil's Hole. "How shall I ever push her in?" thought Sheila as she held out her hand in greeting.

Clarisse took it with all the hectic impulsiveness of youth. "You're his nurse. Isn't it great his coming back this way? All our set is engaged--or about to be--but I'm the only one that's got her man back with battle scars all over him. Makes me feel like a story-book heroine."

Sheila O'Leary didn't know whether she wanted to laugh or cry. She ended by doing what probably surprised her more than it did the girl. She sat down in the wicker chair herself and gathered the girl into her lap. "Oh, you blessed, blessed baby!" she crooned softly.

The girl pouted adorably. It was very evident that she liked to be petted, coaxed, and spoiled. If there was a woman slumbering under all this dimpling, infantile charm, she was quite indiscernible to the woman who held her.

Slowly she bent over the girl and let her face show all the delight she could feel in her prettiness and baby ways. There must be sympathy between them or her task would be hopeless. "There, let me untie that bewitching bonnet of yours and take off your gloves. We have a lot to tell each other before you see your soldier."

"But Phil--won't he be waiting, wondering why I don't come? Oh, I'm just crazy to see him!"

"He doesn't know you're here yet."

"Oh!" The smooth, white forehead did its utmost to manage a frown. "Why, didn't he send for me?"

"No."

"Who did? His mother wrote."

"I sent."

The round, childish eyes filled with apprehension; she wrenched herself free of Sheila's arms. "He isn't going to--The letter said--?"

"He's better. Sit down, dear. That's what we have to talk over. His body is mending fast, but his mind--well, his mind has been taken prisoner."

Clarisse tossed an adorable crown of golden curls. "I don't understand."

"Didn't expect you to, at first. It's this way. He's been through some very big, very terrible experiences, and he can't forget them. He isn't the boy you used to play with, the boy who was happy just having a good time. He's grown very serious. That's what experience is likely to do for us all in time, but with him it's come all in a heap. When that happens you can't go back and be happy in the old way. Do you see?"

"Go on."

"He's bound fast and walled about with the memories of what he has been through--killing human beings, watching his comrades die, seeing what the Germans have done. For the moment it has made him forget that the sun shines and birds sing and the world is a place to be glad in. The bright colors have faded out of life for him; everything looks gray and somber."

"Gee! and how he used to like a good cabaret with a jazz band!" The girl whispered it, and there was awe in her voice. "And colors! I had to wear the gayest things I had, to please him."

"Yes, I know. And he'll like them best again, some day. Just be patient, dear. And the waiting won't be hard, you'll have so much to do for him. You'll have to be bringing the sunshine back, making him listen to the bird-songs, teaching him how to be glad, to love doing all the happy, foolish boy-things he used to like."

"I see--I can." The girl's voice was breathless.

"I'm sure you can." Sheila tried to put conviction into her words. "At first you may find it a little hard. It means--"

"Yes?"

"It means creeping into his prison with him, so gently, so lovingly, and staying close beside him while you cut the memory-cords one by one. Could you do that?"

The girl sprang past Sheila toward the door. "Come! What are we waiting for?"

"But he doesn't know you are here yet," parried the nurse.

"Let's go and tell him, then. He always adored surprises." The dimples in her cheeks danced in anticipation while she took Sheila's hand and tried to drag her nearer the door. But at the threshold something in the woman's face stopped her. She hesitated. "Maybe--maybe he doesn't like surprises any more." Again the impulsive hands were thrust into the nurse's. "Tell me, tell me honestly--You said you sent for me. Was it--Didn't he want me--to come?"

And Sheila, remembering what the boy had loved about her, gave her back the truth: "No, he has grown afraid of you. That's another thing you will have to bring back to him with the songs and the sunlight--his love for you."

Her hand was flung aside and the girl flew past her, back to the wicker chair under Old King Cole. Burying her head in her arms, she burst into uncontrollable sobs, while Sheila stood motionless in the doorway and waited. She must have waited an hour before the girl raised her eyes, wet as her own. For Sheila knew that a woman's soul was being born into the world, and none understood better than she what the agony of travail meant to the child who was giving it birth.

"Come," said Sheila, gently.

The girl rose uncertainly; all the divine assurance of youth was gone. "I think I see," she began unsteadily. "I think I can."

"I know you can." And this time there was no doubt in Sheila's heart.

She saw to it that the little mother had been called away before they reached the Surgical, so that the room was empty except for the occupant of the cot. "Hello, boy!" she called, triumphantly, from the doorway. "I have brought you the best present a soldier ever had," and she pushed Clarisse into the room and closed the door.

For a moment those two young creatures looked at each other, overcome with confusion and the self-consciousness of their own great change.

The boy spoke first. "Clare!"

"Phil!" It came in a breathless little cry, like a bird's answer to its mate. Then the girl followed. Across the room she flew, to the bed, and down on her knees, hiding her face deep in the folds of coverlet and hospital shirt. Words came forth chokingly at last, like bubbles of air rising slowly to the surface.

"Those letters--those awful letters! Just foolish things that didn't matter. One of the boys at the canteen--I used to wait on the table and make believe every soldier I served was mine, and I always wore my prettiest clothes--he said--the boy--that over there they didn't want anything but light stuff--those were his words--said a chap couldn't stand hearing that his girl was lonely.... He said to cut out all the blue funks and the worries; the light stuff helped to steady a chap's nerve. So I--"

And then the boy lied like a soldier. "Don't, Clare darling. I knew all along you were playing off like a good sport. And it helped a lot. Gee! how it helped!"

When Sheila looked in, hours later, the girl was still by the bed, her cheek on the pillow beside the boy's.

It was a strangely illusive Leerie that met Peter that night in the rest-house after the ailing part of the San had been put safely to bed. Her eyes seemed to transcend the stars, and her face might have served for a young neophyte. As Peter saw, for the first time he glimpsed the signal Fate had been playing with so many days.

"What's happened? Anything wrong with those cubs?"

"Nothing. They're as right as right can be." Then with the old directness Sheila plunged headlong into the thing she knew must be done. "Man of mine, I'm going to hurt you. Can you forgive and still understand?"

"I can try." Peter did his best to keep his voice from sounding too heavy, for a fear was gripping at his heart, and his eyes sought Sheila's face, pleading as he would never have let his lips plead.

Sheila covered her eyes. She didn't want to see. It was too reminiscent of the little boy lying awake in a dark attic, afraid of sleep. "We have both done without happiness so long, don't you think we can do without it a little longer?"

"I suppose so--if we must." Peter's voice was very dull. "But why? I've always had an idea that happiness was something like opportunity; it had to be snatched and held fast when it came your way, or you might never have another chance at it." Had Sheila brought him to the gates of Paradise only to bar them against his entering? he wondered.

The woman who loved him understood and laid her hand on his breast as if she would stay the hurt there if she could. "It may make it easier if you know that the giving up is going to be hard for me, too. I've thought about that home of ours so long that I've begun to see it and all that goes with it. I even stumble upon it in my dreams. It's always at the end of a long, tired road, going uphill. If I thought I should have to give it up, I wouldn't have the courage to do what I'm going to now."

She sat down on the bench, laid her arms over the sill of the rustic window, and looked toward the pond. The night was very still; the blurred outlines of the swans, huddled against the bank, were the only signs of life. When she spoke it was almost to herself.

"When they sent me away from the San three years ago I thought I could never bear it--to go away alone, that way, disgraced, to begin work over again in a strange place, among strange people. But I had to do it, just as I have to do this." She straightened and faced Peter. Her voice changed; it belonged to the curt, determined Sheila.

"I'm going across, to nurse the boys over there. The boy over in the Surgical pointed the way for me. There's a big thing going on in the world--something almost as big as the war--it's the business of getting the boys ready for life after their share in the war is over, and I don't mean just nursing their bodies back to health. Everything is changed for them; they've got new standards, new interests, new hearts, new souls, and we women have got to keep pace with them. And we mustn't fail them--don't you see that? Oh, I know I have no place of my own in the war: you are safe, and I have no brothers. But I'm a woman--a nurse, thank God! And I'm free to go for the mothers and sweethearts who can't. Don't you understand?"

And Peter answered from an overwhelmingly full and troubled heart, "Oh yes, I understand."

"I knew you would." Sheila raised starry eyes to the man who had never failed her. "Those boys will need all the sympathy, all the wholesome tenderness we can send across to them, and they'll need our hands at their backs until they get their foothold again. I've served my apprenticeship at that so long I can do it."

Peter gathered her close in his arms. "God and I know how well."

It was not until they were leaving the gardens that Peter asked the question that had been in his mind all through the evening. "What about the wedding? I suppose you're not going to marry me, now."

"Can't. Haven't the courage. Man of mine, don't you know that after I once belonged to you I couldn't leave you? I've only had sips of happiness so far. If I once drained the cup, only God's hand could take it from me."

"And the wedding? The old San's just set its heart on that wedding."

The radiant smile crept back to Sheila's lips. Even in the dark Peter could tell that the old luminous Leerie was beside him once more. "Why, that's one of the nicest parts of it all. We're going to pass our wedding on to those children--make them a sort of wedding-present of it. Won't that be splendid?"

"Oh yes," said Peter, without enthusiasm. "Does it suit them?"

"They don't know yet. Guess I'd better go and tell them."

It is doubtful if anybody but Sheila O'Leary could have managed such an affair and left every one reasonably happy over it--two of them unreasonably so. She accepted the wedding collation bestowed by the wealthy old ladies of the sanitarium and passed it over to the boy and his betrothed as if it had been as trivial a gift as an ice-cream cone. In a like manner she passed on the trousseau, kissed all the nurses rapturously for their work, and piled it all into Clarisse's arms with the remark that it was lucky they were so nearly of a size. When she brought the wedding-dress she kissed her, too, and said that she was going to make the prettiest picture in it that the San or the soldier had seen in years. She placated the management; she wheedled Miss Maxwell into a good humor; she even coaxed Doctor Fuller into giving away the bride. Only Hennessy refused to be propitiated.

"Are ye thinkin' of givin' Mr. Brooks away with everythin' else?" he asked, scornfully; and then, his indignation rising to a white wrath, he shouted, "I'll not put bows on the swans, an' I'll not come to any second-hand weddin'."

But he did come, and held with Flanders the satin ribbons they had promised to hold for Sheila. And the wedding became one of the greenest of all the memories that had gone down on the San books.

As the sun clipped the far-away hills the boy was wheeled down the paths to where the gold and white of early roses were massed in summer splendor. Then came the girl with Sheila at her side; the girl had begged too hard to be refused. But Sheila's face was as white as it had been the day they operated on Doctor Dempsy, and only Peter guessed what it cost her to stand with the bride. To Peter's care had been intrusted the little mother, and he let her weep continually on his shoulder in between the laughs he kept bringing to her lips.

And it all ended merrily. Sheila saw to that. But perhaps the thing that gave her the keenest pleasure was wheedling out of Mr. Crotchets his bungalow that stood on the slopes beyond the golf-links for a honeymoon.

"They'll have all the quiet they want and the care he still needs," she told Peter when they were alone. "And nobody but the nurse in charge knows about it--yet." Then seeing the great longing in Peter's eyes, she drew him away from the crowd. "Listen, man of mine! I have the feeling that when we are married there will be no wedding, just you and I and the preacher. And in my heart I like it better that way."

"So do I," agreed Peter.

"I'm leaving--train to-night," Sheila hurried on. "No use putting it off; better sail as soon as the passport's ready. There's just one thing more I want to say before I leave you."

Then Peter chuckled for the first time that day. "You can say it, of course, but if you think you're going to leave me behind, you're mistaken. I wired the chief the day you told me. They need another correspondent over there. When it comes to passports there is some advantage in not being a husband, after all. Well--are you glad?"

When Hennessy came upon them, a few minutes later, they looked so supremely happy and oblivious of the rest of the world that he was forced to stop. "Sure, ye might be the bride an' groom, afther all, by the looks of ye. What's come over ye all of a sudden?" And when Peter told him, and they both put their hands in Hennessy's in final parting, he shirred his lips and whistled forth evidence of a satisfied emotion to which he added a word of warning to Peter:

"I'm not envyin' ye, just the same, Mr. Brooks. Afore ye get her home again ye'll find the Irish say right, 'A woman's more throuble to look afther than a thorn in the foot or a goat fetched back from the fair!'"