I believe the record of my last month at Sherborn shows not a single punishment among between three and four hundred women. They grew to feel that the only hurt of their punishment was the pain it gave me. When I met them for the last night in the chapel, and told them we should not meet again, and invited each to come and bid me good-bye, the sobs and wails that went out, and the tears that went over my hands as I held theirs for the last time, were harder for me than all the eight months’ work I had done among them. As I passed down the long corridors in the dark, unheard by them, at ten o’clock, and the low moans and sobs were still going out, it was too much to bear. I sought my own room--sank down, cold and shivering with the terrible thought that rushed over me--Had it not been all wrong? Was I far enough removed from them? Surely we must be too near alike, if not akin, or they would never have clung to me with that pitiful love. I went out from the prison walls of Sherborn next morning. I have never seen a face there since. I have never returned and I have no desire to. CHAPTER XII THE RED CROSS IN PEACE The Red Cross as organized in Europe, and as Clara Barton learned of it there, had no ministry except in times of war. It was one of the distinctive features of Clara Barton’s plan that the American Red Cross should give service in any time of national, or possibly of international, calamity. So far as the Red Cross existed by virtue of an international treaty, its work was to care for the wounded of the battle-field; but the American Red Cross, as incorporated in the District of Columbia, and as operated under the direction of Clara Barton, offered an agency immediately available for the relief of suffering wherever the need was greater than could be met by local benefactions.