“So we have, but so long as there’s fighting to be done I’d rather be there than cooling my heels along the Rhine. And our men aren’t having an easy time,—that poor little force at Archangel.”
  
“Oh, I know there’s lots of work to do!” Lucy exclaimed, suddenly roused from her childish depression, and involuntarily she opened the woolen cape she wore and glanced at her nurse’s aide’s uniform. “I’ll stop growling and try to help.”
  
“I don’t think you’ll have much trouble doing it,” said Larry, smiling down at her, “judging by what you’ve done so far. Only this time you’ll have an easier job of it,—no prisoners to set free. You can’t imagine a peacefuller spot than that little hospital you’re going to. It’s lost in the forest, and even the village near it looks half asleep and as though it might tumble any minute down the hillside.”
  
“The peacefuller it is the better I’ll like it,” said Lucy with something of a sigh. “I’ve had enough of war.”
  
Although General Gordon was stationed with the Fifth Army Headquarters in Coblenz, where already, a month after the armistice, American troops had taken possession of houses in the German city and were preparing for their long stay in the occupied territory, Lucy herself was still on duty elsewhere. With the end of the fighting, need for war workers of all sorts had not grown less. Mrs. Gordon could not yet leave her hospital at Cannes, and Lucy had been urged to keep on as nurse’s aide with an insistence that could not but fill her with honest pride and satisfaction. The army surgeons spoke to her of the increasing need of nurses among the convalescents, and Miss Pearse frankly begged Lucy not to abandon her.
  
“You can go to Coblenz in the spring, Lucy dear,” the young nurse persuaded, when new plans and changes of base occupied every mind in the joyful week after the armistice. “We have to garrison Coblenz for fifteen years, they say, so your father will probably be there a good while. But perhaps he won’t,” she added, smiling at Lucy’s face, grown disconsolate at her words. “Anyway, while you’re over here I know you’d sooner be helping. There’s almost more to do than ever. The men have been rather let down by the war’s end and all the delays following. They don’t know what to do with themselves, especially the wounded who are slow in getting well. We’ve got to give them a Christmas that will stifle their homesickness a little. And I can’t half work without you, Lucy. I’m so used to having my little aide to call on. You’ll stay, won’t you?”This was not the sort of persuasion Lucy could resist, when her heart was already in the work that she had learned in such a hard school of suffering and anxiety. She eagerly consented to follow Miss Pearse wherever her father would allow her to go, which ended by 

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