At a Girl's Mercy, or, The Fortunes of War — page 171: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

160 AT A GIRI’S MERCY. geon had no fault to find with Nurse Travers, even when he called her away, time after time, from the side of her friend, who was very quiet, sleeping as he must sleep to recover, but lying so white and still that her heart at times must fail her for thinking his heart had ceased to beat. But no one knew save the surgeon that a closer friend than any there was under her care, and no one could find any fault with - the gentle nurse who bent above them as tender and sweet as she would have bent above the other, and her voice was as soft and steady, with its brave effort to comfort and strengthen the impatient souls under the restraint of suffering, as it could have been at any other time. But as she went among the cots of her section, there wasa slight lingering beside that on which lay the sturdy form of her old time friend, and the set face upon the pillows, so white — and still, never knew of the tender light in the warm hazel eyes of the woman bending above, her © soul going out in the praver for the recovery of this brave soldier of whom the world was in need, of whom she would not think in sadder thought than of the others, for she could not bring herself to be willing for him to go, he, her friend from childhood, and it may be her tender soul, set so close around him, held back his soul when it must have otherwise gone from his keeping. Butit was sorry watching for her. How could she hold so utterly her heart in check as she did, she could never know herself, for it was sorely trying, but she kept her pure faith and her pure soul free from thought of self, and the days passed, many of them with this new soldier of hers raving upon his bed, struggling with his nurses and the surgeons, fighting over, it would seem, the bat- tles he had passed through, but through them all bearing the thought of the old Hall with its home faces and the face of this friend who was watching him with the tenderness she had promised his sister she would give him should there be need. She had not forgotten her promise; she could never forget — her promise, nor the sad evening she spent ere she left her home, with the dainty, true eyed sister of this man, whose soul had been in her eyes as she