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merely to help out on a ward! Major Thorne let them groan and then said:
    “As a consolation prize, ladies, you are invited to take the afternoon off. There are several beautiful little English villages within cycling or hitchhiking distance of here. Go and explore and have yourselves a tea party!”
    That was very pleasant consolation. Flight Three dressed themselves in their formal khaki jackets and skirts, and went off to pay a call on the nearest English village. A mail corporal gave them a lift in his jeep.
    They rode along a narrow, gently winding road, past massive rugged old trees and lovely meadows laced with crystal streams. “It’s like fairyland,” Maggie murmured.
    Cherry breathed in deeply of the fresh sweet air, but she was thinking of something else. She wondered if, by any chance, the village they were on their way to visit M Y S T E R Y O F M A R K G R A I N G E R
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    would turn out to be the village where Mrs. Eldredge lived. Cherry had not yet learned the names and loca-tions of the surrounding villages. She was disinclined to ask the jeep driver, nor did she want to discuss it with the other girls. The trouble Mrs. Eldredge was facing might be of a confidential nature. Dr. Joe had warned her to be “discreet.” Cherry decided, “I won’t try to do more this afternoon than get my bearings in a strange place.”
    So she leaned back between Ann and Gwen, and drank in the sight of sun and leaves and dappled shadows, and enjoyed herself.
    Their first glimpse of the little town was a curtain of protective barrage balloons, low in the sky, attached to cables. These helped fend off enemy planes. They saw three houses with roofs missing. In another house they looked in through a broken wall and saw a woman, wearing her coat, cooking at a stove. But at the village square, where the jeep driver called “Last stop!”, they found themselves in a kind of storybook village.
    “It must be a movie set,” Gwen insisted, as they all stood and stared. “It can’t be real.” Elsie planted her feet firmly on the ground, industri-ously opened her guidebook, and read aloud, “Forty-five million people live on this small crowded island. The need for privacy has made them reserved. The Magna Charta was the first democratic bill of rights—”
    “Elsie! We can do that later!” 40
    C H E R R Y A M E S , F L I G H T N U R S E
    Elsie thumbed through the book. “I had the wrong page. No place in England,” she read brightly, “is more than a hundred miles from the sea. There is a great variety of scenery. The—”
    “Well, look at the scenery!”
    “—Tower of London is a thousand years old, and—”
    “It’s positively dreamy,” Agnes Gray crooned to herself. “Oh, do you suppose we’ll be permitted to take pictures?”
    Cherry and Ann were murmuring, “It’s lovely, lovely!” Nestled in a green valley, this village, with its low ancient buildings, was like a jewel cupped in a setting. A mellow patina of age had softened and deepened all the colors. The rosy bricks of the many-chimneyed houses were overgrown with rustling ivy, shaded by massive trees. Plaster cottages with steep, sloping, thatched roofs and dormer windows sat amidst gardens. The pub—public house—and the Fish and Chips shop displayed curious many-paned windows, and worn stone doorsteps that must have known the tread of the people of Elizabethan times. The silvery-gray fieldstone church, of exquisite and simple design, stood in the heart of the village, facing the single winding tree-lined street, High Street. Along the lanes were gardens and hedges ripe with centuries of cultivation. Over everything hung a seren-ity and dignity, even in wartime, which was very impressive.

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    The nurses strolled past a line of people patiently waiting at a sign Queue Up Here For Bus . Their pitifully shabby clothes, rather worn faces, several bandaged arms and legs and heads, bespoke the hardships of