old affairs so that
she could answer any summons at a few hours' notice; and went to
bed dead tired, and slept badly, dreaming of dead men. The morning
sun found her pale and depressed. She had decided to destroy
Berkley's letters. She burned all, except one; then went to her
class work.

Dr. Benton's class was very busy that morning, experimenting on the
doctor's young assistant with bandages, ligatures, lint, and
splints. Letty, wearing only her underclothes, lay on the
operating table, her cheek resting on her bared arm, watching Ailsa
setting a supposed compound fracture of the leg, and, at intervals,
quietly suggesting the proper methods.

Autumn sunshine poured through the windows gilding the soft gray
garb of Sainte Ursula's nursing sisterhood which all now wore on
duty.

The girl on the table lay very still, now and then directing or
gently criticising the well-intended operations on limb and body.
And after the allotted half hour had struck, she sat up, smiling at
Ailsa, and, slipping to the floor, dressed rapidly, talking all the
while in her pretty, gentle way about bandages and bones and
fractures and dislocations.

A few minutes after she had completed dressing and was standing
before the glass, smoothing the dark, silky masses of her hair, Dr.
Benton arrived, absent-eyed, preoccupied at first, then in a
fidgety humour which indicated something was about to happen. It
happened.

"Could any lady get ready in time to take the noon train for
Washington?" he asked abruptly.

There was a startled silence; the call had come at last.

Mrs. Rutherford said quietly: "I will go. But I must see my
husband and children first. I could be ready by to-morrow, if that
will do."

Another--a young girl--said: "I could not leave my mother at an
hour's notice. She is ill. Would tomorrow do, Dr. Benton?"

"I--think I can go to-day," said Ailsa in a low voice.

"Our quota is to be two nurses," said the doctor. But no other
lady could possibly leave before the morrow; and it was, after all,
scarcely fair to expect it of women with families to be provided
for and home responsibilities to be arranged.

"I could go to-day--if I may be permitted," said the doctor's young
assistant, timidly.

He swung around and scowled at her, lips compressed, eyes gleaming
through his spectacles:

"You are not asked to go, Miss Lynden."

"I--thought----"

"Do you want to go?"

"If Mrs. Paige is going--alone----"