And as the little girl interpreted her words, suddenly Ruth knew that what she was speaking was truth, truth she might have heard before but never recognized or realized till now.
The mother lifted her sorrowful face all tear swollen and tried a pitiful smile, nodded to say she understood, then dropped sobbing again upon the window sill. The father lifted a sad face, not too sober, but blear-eyed and pitiful, too, in his hopelessness, and nodded as if he accepted the fact she had told but it gave him no comfort, and then went back to his own despair.
Ruth turned away with aching heart, praying: "Oh, God, they need you! Come and comfort them. I don't know how!" But somehow, on her homeward way she seemed to have met and been greeted by her Saviour.
It was so she received her baptism for the work that she was to do.
The next day permission came for her to go to France, and she entered upon her brief training.
"Don't you dread to have her go?" asked a neighbor of Aunt Rhoda.
"Oh, yes," sighed the good lady comfortably, "but then she is going in good company, and it isn't as if all the best people weren't doing it. Of course, it will be great experience for her, and I wouldn't want to keep her out of it. She'll meet a great many nice people over there that she might not have met if she had stayed at home. Everybody, they tell me, is at work over there. She'll be likely to meet the nobility. It isn't as if we didn't have friends there, too, who will be sure to invite her over week ends. If she gets tired she can go to them, you know. And really, I was glad to have something come up to take her away from that miserable little country slum she has been so crazy about. I was dreadfully afraid she would catch something there or else they would rob us and murder us and kidnap her some day."
And that was the way things presented themselves to Aunt Rhoda!