The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me by White, William Allen, 1868-1944

That sounded good to me. Evidently she had written to the Young Doctor before the Gilded Youth had appeared. Also presumably she had not written to the Gilded Youth. If she had written to him after the air raid that had killed the head nurse, it would indicate that she had turned to the Young Doctor, in an emotional crisis, and that he was still a safe bet, as against the Gilded Youth. The only question which occurred to me to develop this fact was this: "Did she tell you that she was made assistant to the new head nurse that came to supply the place of the one who was slain by the Germans?" Henry looked at me as if he thought the question was unfair.

"Yes," laughed the Doctor, "in the very first line."

"What odds are you giving now, Bill?" asked Henry bitterly.

"In the very first line,--" we could all three see the Eager face, the proud blue eyes, the pretty effective hands brushing the straying crinkly strands of red hair from her forehead, as she sat there in the bare little nurses' room, bringing her first promotion in pride to the young Doctor. Perhaps he did not realize all that it meant. For you see he was very young. Certainly he did not understand about the odds and repeated the word in a question. Henry cut in, "Oh, nothing, only that night after they went walking in the hospital yard, Bill made me give him three to five. Now I ought to have two to one. It's all over but the shouting." And Henry laughed at the Young Doctor's bewilderment; but the young Doctor looked at his bandaged hand and shook his head. The walk in the hospital yard was disturbing news to him.

"Ah, don't worry about that," Henry reassured him. "Why, man, you ought to have heard what she said about you!" And Henry, being a good-natured sort, told the Doctor what the Eager Soul had said to the Gilded Youth in the hospital compound, while the buzzing monsters in the air were singing their nightingale songs of death in the moonlight.

We left the Young Doctor after he had squeezed out of us all the news we had of the girl. Long after we had passed through the garden gate, out into the white, gravel-paved court under the proud arch and into the crooked, low, grey-walled canyon of the street, we thought of the Young Doctor sitting there reading blue eyes into china asters, red hair into dahlias, pink cheeks into the phlox, and hearing ineffable things whispered among the leaves of the melancholy yew tree. And all that, in a land of waste and desolation, with war's alarms on every wind.

And we thought that he looked more like a poet than a Doctor even in his uniform; and less like a soldier than either. Such is the alchemy of love in youth!

CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY TO ITALY