She leaped up from the reading to cry out something that was unutterable.
All the intervening weeks of shame and anguish and fury and strife and
pathos, and the endless striving to forget, were as if by the magic of a
letter made nothing but vain oblations.
"He loves me still!" she whispered, and pressed her breast with clenching
hands, and laughed in wild exultance, and paced her room like a caged
lioness. It was as if she had just awakened to the assurance she was
beloved. That was the shibboleth--the cry by which she sounded the closed
depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a woman's insatiate
vanity.
Then she snatched up the letter, to scan it again, and, suddenly grasping
the import of Glenn's request, she hurried to the telephone to find the
number of the hospital in Bedford Park. A nurse informed her that visitors
were received at certain hours and that any attention to disabled soldiers
was most welcome.
Carley motored out there to find the hospital merely a long one-story frame
structure, a barracks hastily thrown up for the care of invalided men of
the service. The chauffeur informed her that it had been used for that
purpose during the training period of the army, and later when injured
soldiers began to arrive from France.
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