Belinda of the Red Cross

The military-looking surgeon stalking ahead had not adjusted his mask; the jetty, cropped beard he wore on his full chin gave his countenance an especially sinister expression....

Sanderson awoke with the sun streaming in through the high window and lying like a golden mantle flung across the floor and bed. Otherwise everything in the room seemed glaringl...

There was a tiny apartment not too far from the hospital that Belinda Melnotte called home for these two years of her hospital training. It was presided over by Aunt Roberta.

There was a florist's box in Belinda's little sleeping room on the last day of her occupancy of it. She was almost afraid to open it at first, for she feared the card within mig...

Frank Sanderson rode to the North River pier in a taxicab and Jim, his next older brother, who had always been a good chum of the aviator's, rode with him.

Belinda had seen Frank Sanderson at the captain's table; but he had not spied her. She sat with her back to him while listening to the talk of the Yankee shipmaster. The aviator...

The passengers on deck crowded to the rail at which Belinda Melnotte and her party were already standing. There was no outcry, and the crew went about their duties, but like mag...

The port with its crowded docks, bulging store-houses, trains of wounded English going home, platoons of prisoners likewise boarding the transports for the concentration camps i...

The train rolled on staggeringly. Berth cars had long since been removed from all military trains as being too cumbersome. The exigencies of the situation demanded that comfort...

The _directrice_ was just as positive and bustling a little Frenchwoman as Aunt Roberta. Belinda was quite sure she must have made an atrocious nurse, even in time of peace; but...

The guns continued to thunder and shake the huts. The stretcher bearers came and went. The three operating tables were so thickly surrounded by white-gowned surgeons that one co...

The battle had opened unexpectedly, and no time had been given to weed out those _blessés_ who were convalescent. More wounded would be coming in hourly, and now all that could...

Belinda Melnotte took to her lodging that night a heavy and troubled spirit. Sanderson's visit to the hospital had lifted not at all the burden of doubt and unhappiness that she...

Sanderson, in his fast-flying Nieuport, shaped his course in a long slant toward the trenches. He flew over the hospital in which Belinda worked. She might then be wending her w...

This long and anxious day closed, and night came. Belinda did not go back to old Minerva's. She was sure she would find nobody at the thatch-roofed cottage. Indeed, she might no...

And Belinda wondered! She had listened to the patriotic speeches of the wounded Frenchmen for months. She had considered herself almost wholly French. She had scarcely endured,...

It had seemed to Belinda Melnotte as though she were only marking time during these retrograde movements of the French forces and the advance of the German line. But to Frank Sa...

"Poor Ernest is suffering greatly, Fräulein," he said. "These boys! They should be at home with their mothers. It matters not so much that war takes us old fellows. It is cruele...

The report Captain Raphael Dexter brought Sanderson, that Belinda was missing from the hospital unit, at first benumbed the young aviator's mind. He could scarcely believe it; y...

Every time Frank Sanderson soared upward in an aeroplane he fully realized that danger rode with him. That was why he was so successful as a pilot. The "ace" is not the man who...

When one has long expected a certain disaster, even though it be one that can be averted by no act of the victim, a reprieve can scarcely be a greater relief than the shock of a...

Sanderson flung to the winds the caution and hesitancy that had marked his attitude in the first of his intercourse with Belinda. Now he even ignored his brother Jim's advice.

Of course, it was his time for sleeping. His hours off duty were short enough at the best. Somebody had gone to his cot to call him and he was not there. The bed had not been sl...

Most of the communications between Belinda and Frank Sanderson during this forenoon had been of the most casual kind--a glance, a whispered word, a sly pressure of the hand. But...

"No! _Gott!_ No! I fight for the Fatherland," declared Paul proudly. Then he suddenly drew her arm into his again, saying: "Pardon, Cousin. But keep away from the Herr Lieutenan...

When Belinda finally found time to speak at length to Sanderson he had already received from Erard a full account of the lame man's meeting with the French spy, Renaud.

This burden of anxiety in addition to all her other troubles broke down even Belinda Melnotte's calm. She scarcely dared go near Sanderson for more than a moment at a time durin...

She turned from seeing Erard marched away guarded by the file of soldiers, to face the Prussian surgeon. She realized that at last Doctor Herschall had discovered all that she h...

The uncertainties--the desperate peril--of the situation wrung Belinda Melnotte's heart until it seemed that no longer drops could filter from her eyes. She had wept all her tea...

"Treachery is afoot. These cousins of yours, Fräulein Belinda--the sergeant-major and the corporal--they are in this conspiracy, too? I have had my eye on them. The evidence I m...

"Do not weep for them," he urged, knowing her tender heart was torn by this parting from the cousins. "Believe all will come right in the end. And they are brave boys."

"You are a sight for sore eyes, Sandy!" he declared. "When Renaud brought back the news of your accident and that you were fooling the _Boches_, we voted you the palm. But _now_...

"But you fly for our country, Frank--for America! She needs you, as she needs me. We Americans have entered this war with noble intent. As our forefathers fought for freedom and...