'Smiles', page 179 by Eliot H. Robinson
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knows what else over at Simmons College, for four whole months. I shall simply die, I just know that I shall!"
Miss Merriman gently explained the necessity for each of them; but wisely refrained from further frightening her by adding that a full year's course was to be crowded into those sixteen weeks.
In due time these, too, were over, the awe-inspiring examination passed, and Smiles was accepted as worthy of a place among the pupil nurses. Like an athlete she had finished her preliminary training, and was ready for the long, gruelling race toward the goal, two and a half years distant.
Hard work though it was, Rose found all her days sunny ones, and only one cloud partly obscured their brightness. Donald she saw on rare occasions only, as the demands upon his time doubled and redoubled, and of course their brief meetings at the hospital demanded strict formality of intercourse. Deeply as he felt for her, he was a physician first, last and all the time, and as uncompromising in his own ethics as he was in his requirements of the nurses.
Yet, if she saw him seldom, there was another whom she saw increasingly often. Dr. Bentley's attitude towards Rose was also strictly professional; but he never failed to bow and speak pleasantly when he met her in the corridors or wards, and she instinctively felt that in him she had found another real friend.
Rose was too much a child of nature to be given to thinking much about men; but there were minutes, just before sleep came at night, when her mind would visualize Donald's strong, kindly face, which seemed to look down at her with an expression almost fatherly, and she would whisper a little prayer that she might help him as she had resolved to, that night on the mountain top. And at such times another face, light, where his was dark, came, not to supplant, but to supplement it.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE CALL OF THE RED CROSS
Despite the enthralling inte