"When you feel inclined and if you are strong enough, I wonder if you will not tell me something about yourself and where you were trying to go when we picked you up yesterday? Red Cross nurses have been in many unexpected places since the beginning of the war, yet one scarcely looks to find one lost in the snow in such a picturesque fashion," Sonya suggested half smiling and half serious. In answer to Sonya's speech, the girl pushed the tray of food which by this time she had finished eating, to the bottom of her bed and sat resting her chin in the palms of her hands. She was leaning forward with her shoulders lifted and wearing a little white flannel dressing sacque which Bianca Zoli must have loaned to her. "I want very much to explain to you, Mrs. Clark, and I am entirely all right again, only perhaps a little tired from my adventure. I do not seem even to have taken cold. First of all my name is Nora Jamison and I have traveled all the way from California to France, across a country and across an ocean. Was it my good fortune or my ill fortune that I landed in Paris just three days before the armistice was signed to begin my Red Cross nursing? I have been looking forward to the opportunity it seems to me for years. Oh, I have done war nursing, but near one of the California camps." The girl turned her eyes at this moment to glance out the small window cut into the wall just beside her bed. They were remarkable eyes, Sonya had already observed, sometimes a light brown in shade, then flecked with green and grey tones. Not in any sense was the rest of the face beautiful, although oddly interesting, the nose long and delicate, the lips thin with slightly irregular white teeth. "I want to see what this French country is like, Mrs. Clark, see it until I shall never forget its desolation as compared to the fruitfulness and tranquility of our own. Some day when I return home I mean to make some of my own country people share my impression with me." Then without further explanation of her meaning she turned again to her companion. "I wonder if you are going to be willing to do me a great favor? Strange, I know, to be asking a favor of some one who has never seen one and knows nothing of one, save that I am already in your debt! I want you to take me with you as one of your Red Cross nurses to work with the army of occupation on the Rhine. Please don't refuse me yet.