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from me it’s about the doggiest suite in this love nest. Who wouldn’t rush to be a nurse with such luxury flung in the very teeth? That not so, Glennie?”
     
    CHAPTER 11
      The nurse thus addressed had just followed them upstairs and into the room, wearing a long cape and a weary air. She was a big, rawboned, redheaded Scot with chapped hands and a dour and taciturn stare. Shedding her cape, she subsided on her bed, her gaze fixed all the while, not unpleasantly, on Anne.
      “You two ought to know each other,” Nora went on airily. “This is the new comrade, Glennie. Anne Lee’s the name.”
      As with Nora, there was something about Glennie—despite her forbidding exterior—which made Anne feel that she had found a friend. Five minutes later when the three girls went down to lunch together, Anne felt herself accepted by the other two.
      On the threshold of the dining room Glennie paused impressively. “Have ye a good appetite?” she asked Anne gravely.
      “Why?” Anne replied, unthinkingly.
      “Oh, nothing, nothing,” said Glennie with the same gravity. “It’s just that if ye’re not verra hungry, I recommend the roast turkey. Woman, it’s real tasty.”
      A minute later Anne understood why Nora shrieked with laughter.
      The nurses’ refectory was a large bare hall with a double row of plain tables at which perhaps forty nurses were already seated. Two elderly maids in pink striped coveralls were noisily handing round the plates.
      Anne sat down beside her two friends, and in due course food was placed before her. At least Anne could only assume it was food. But it was a pitiful diet for hardworking women. Most of the nurses were making the best of it in an apathetic manner. And Anne, feeling Nora’s quizzical eye upon her, conquered her nausea and did the same.
      She was due for duty at two o’clock. Whatever had been her appetite for the food, her eagerness for her work was unquestionable. At five minutes to that hour she was in Ward C. And by five minutes past the hour she was fully aware that, no matter if in other respects the hospital was deficient, in its range of cases it surpassed the County a hundredfold. Though she liked all the branches of her profession, she was particularly fond of surgical work, and here in C were at least half a dozen post-operative specials such as she might not have seen at Shereford in twenty years. Not only that. Since today was receiving day, a stream of fresh cases kept pouring into the ward. She set to work joyfully.
     
    CHAPTER 12
      For over two hours she was gloriously busy with work full of interest and humanity, touching the depths of pain and squalor, the heights of fortitude and skill, compassing the pinnacles and the pits of life.
      At half-past four, when she was engrossed in redressing a septic sinus case, she was abruptly interrupted. From the end of the ward she heard the peremptory call of “Nurse.” Turning, she observed in the doorway a smartly dressed young man, with perfect creases in his trousers and an equally immaculate parting in his flaxen hair.
      “Nurse,” he called again in an even louder tone.
      Anne’s face flushed sharply. She put down her dressings and came slowly down the ward toward him.
      “Are you quite deaf?” The inquiry was made with supercilious rudeness. “When I sing out for a nurse, I expect her to step on it. You’re new, aren’t you?”
      “Yes.” Anne confined herself to the monosyllable, though in her indignation she could readily have said more.
      “Hm!” The exclamation contained a note of mollified conceit. “You probably didn’t realize who I am. Doctor Caley—Doctor George Caley, M.B. I’m the house surgeon here. Next time I come in the ward you stand up and take notice.”
      If Anne had a fault, it was her pride, and now she lost her temper utterly. “I usually am standing up in the ward,” she said sharply, “and I hope I’m taking notice. But perhaps you