d I should have arrived safely at the hospital and been none the
worse for my long walk. You won't mind if I go on eating a moment
longer, will you? I am dreadfully hungry and I have just succeeded in
persuading the charming little girl who is taking care of me that there
is nothing in the world the matter with me today, except the need for
food. I really feel no worse from yesterday's experience, although it is
nice to be so deliciously warm after one has come fairly near being
frozen."
As the girl talked, the older woman came and took a little chair beside
the bed. The newcomer to the hospital, who had been rescued from the
snow storm the afternoon before, Sonya now discovered was not so young
as she had originally believed. On closer observation there were tiny
lines about the girl's eyes, a little droop at the corners of her mouth,
which might, however, be due partly to fatigue and exposure.
"When you feel inclined and if you are strong enough, I wonder if you
will not tell me something about yourself and where you were trying to
go when we picked you up yesterday? Red Cross nurses have been in many
unexpected places since the beginning of the war, yet one scarcely looks
to find one lost in the snow in such a picturesque fashion," Sonya
suggested half smiling and half serious.
In answer to Sonya's speech, the girl pushed the tray of food which by
this time she had finished eating, to the bottom of her bed and sat
resting her chin in the palms of her hands. She was leaning forward with
her shoulders lifted and wearing a little white flannel dressing sacque
which Bianca Zoli must have loaned to her.
"I want very much to explain to you, Mrs. Clark, and I am entirely all
right again, only perhaps a little tired from my adventure. I do not
seem even to have taken cold. First of all my name is Nora Jamison and I
have traveled all the way from California to France, across a country
and across an ocean. Was it my good fortune or my ill fortune that I
landed in Paris just three days before the armistice was signed to begin
my Red Cross nursing? I have been looking forward to the opportunity it
seems to me for years. Oh, I have done war nursing, but near one of the
California camps."
The girl turned her eyes at this moment to glance out the small window
cut into the wall just beside her bed.
They were remarkable eyes, Sonya had already observed, sometimes a light
brown in shade, then flecked with green and grey to
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