along the Moselle, a lovely woodland countryside which went far toward bringing back Lucy’s lost serenity. 

“I love the country, don’t you, Miss Pearse?” she said, breathing deep breaths of the piney air. “I should think sick men would get well quickly here.” 

“I hope they will,” the young nurse responded. “But I’m sure they’d get well quicker if these woods were in Maine or in Michigan,—anywhere at home.” 

Her voice betrayed her and Lucy looked at her friend with a quick thrill of sympathy. Miss Pearse was as homesick as she herself, in spite of her stoic calm. And, meeting the glance of an orderly who sat on a case of supplies in one corner of the lorry, Lucy read the same longing in his eyes even before he exclaimed almost involuntarily, “Or not even woods or rivers, Miss. Just the docks at Hoboken would look good enough to me.” 

The little village of Badheim was perched upon a hillside, the road winding at its foot. The lorry turned sharply away from the Moselle to begin a long climb up a heavily wooded slope. The forest now closed in on both sides,—majestic oaks, mixed with pines and hemlocks which sang and murmured as the river breeze swept over them. Rabbits darted across the road and squirrels chattered in the overhanging branches. All at once the hospital appeared, a big frame building in a clearing near the top of the hill, its roof in spreading gables, like a Swiss chalet, and the Stars and Stripes floating over it. 

Behind it were half a dozen cottages for the staff. The whole had a weather-beaten look, for it had stood there more than fifty years, and an air of solitude enveloped it, as though it were much further removed from town and village than it really was. Lucy decided in one glance that it needed sunlight and cheerful voices to keep from being a gloomy spot where the murmur of the swaying pines would change to sighs of loneliness. 

In fact the convalescent soldiers seated on the verandas or strolling over the grassy clearing and in the borders of the woodland looked sober and purposeless, their idle steps leading vaguely from one spot to the other, without any spur of hopeful energy. Lucy understood at last Miss Pearse’s eloquent persuasions, and seeing how sorely help was needed here, she forgot her own repinings and was herself again. 

Miss Pearse and Lucy installed themselves in a room in one of the cottages beside the hospital,—a sort of shed built of heavy unpainted planks, with sloping roof and 

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