"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."