s a
feeling I never had before," she said to Richard, as she helped him pack
his bag before going on his rounds, "that what I am doing is worth while.
I know I should have felt it when I was darning stockings, but I didn't."

She gloried in the professional aspect which she gave to everything. She
installed little Francois at a small table in the Garden Room. He
answered the telephone and wrote the messages on slips of paper which he
laid on the doctor's desk. Cousin Sulie at another table saw the people
who came in Richard's absence.

"Nancy can read to the patients up-stairs and cut flowers for them and
cook nice things for them," she confided, "but I like to be down here
when the children come in to ask for medicine, and when the mothers come
to find out what they shall feed the convalescents. Richard, I never
heard anything like their--hungriness--when they are getting well."

Beulah, emerging slowly from among the shadows, began to think of things
to eat. She didn't care about anything else. She didn't care for Eric's
love, or her mother's gladness, or Richard's cheerfulness, or the nurses'
sympathy. She cared only to think of every kind of food that she had ever
liked in her whole life, and to ask if she might have it.

"But, dear heart, the doctor doesn't think that you should," Eric would
protest.

She would cry, weakly, "You don't love me, or you would let me."

She begged and begged, and at last he couldn't stand it.

"You are starving her," he told the nurses fiercely.

They referred him to the doctor.

Eric telephoned Richard.

"My dear fellow," was the response, "her appetite is a sign that she is
getting well."

"But she is so hungry."

"So are they all. I have to steel my heart against them, especially the
children. And half of the convalescents are reading cook books."

"Cook books!"

"Yes. In that way they get a meal by proxy. I tell them to pick out the
things they are going to have when they are well enough to eat all they
want. Their choice ranges from Welsh rarebits to plum puddings."

He laughed, but Eric saw nothing funny in the matter. "I can't bear to
see her--suffer."

Richard was sobered at once. "Don't think that I am not sympathetic.
But--Brand, I don't dare-_feel_. If I did, I should go to pieces."

Slowly the weeks passed. Besides Francois' mother, two of Richard's
patients died. Slowly the pendulum of time swung the rest of the sick
ones toward recovery. Nancy and Sul