Yet, if she saw him seldom, there was another whom she saw increasingly often. Dr. Bentley's attitude towards Rose was also strictly professional; but he never failed to bow and speak pleasantly when he met her in the corridors or wards, and she instinctively felt that in him she had found another real friend. Rose was too much a child of nature to be given to thinking much about men; but there were minutes, just before sleep came at night, when her mind would visualize Donald's strong, kindly face, which seemed to look down at her with an expression almost fatherly, and she would whisper a little prayer that she might help him as she had resolved to, that night on the mountain top. And at such times another face, light, where his was dark, came, not to supplant, but to supplement it. CHAPTER XXVI THE CALL OF THE RED CROSS Despite the enthralling interest of her new work and surroundings, it seemed to Rose, during the year after she gained entrance to the temple of her desire, that her life was standing still, while all things else were speeding by her at a breakneck pace. It had never been so before. Even in the isolation and simplicity of her former home she had felt that she was a part of it all. It had seemed to her, somehow, as though her existence had been patterned after her own turbulent mountain stream, which danced along through sunshine and shade, with here and there a ravine and cataract, here and there a rapid or impeding boulder in its course; but always moving, moving. Then, suddenly, it was as though that swift little river had fallen into a broad, quiet basin, walled in, where it moved forward almost imperceptibly. True, it was daily gaining greater depth and fulness as it gathered to itself the tributary waters of knowledge and experience, and Smiles was not insensible to this fact. But it was difficult to remember it always, for the outer world of events was moving forward so fast. The very day upon which her probationary period came to an end and, with a smile on her lips, a song in her heart, she placed the cherished cap upon her gold-brown curls, there came, from the heart of the swiftly piled up, lowering clouds, the blinding flash which shattered the peace of the world and started the overwhelming conflagration into the seething, bloody-tongued vortex into which nation after nation was sucked irresistibly. The world had become the plaything of the Gods of Wrath. Black days passed, shuddering things of horror to Rose, when she had time to allow her mind to dwell upon them, and her keen imagination to picture the atrocities which the fiend was committing upon the helpless babies of Belgium and France.