"Mrs. Paige is a very charming and very sweet little lady, excellently equipped by experience to take the field with Sainte Ursula's Sisterhood, but self-distrustful and afraid of her own behaviour on a battle-field where the emergency corps might be under fire. In _this_ sort of woman I have every confidence." The next day Ailsa enrolled; arranged her household 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----" Ailsa looked at her, gratefully surprised, but smiled her thanks. "If Miss Lynden may come, Dr. Benton, I would be very glad. May she?"