Barbara came next, four long years older than Jasper. She had a round, rosy face and kind brown eyes that readily filled with tears, and her little heart overflowed with love and pity for the wounded.
Alison was quite old when war broke out. She could remember times when sweets “were nothing so very much--everybody eat them,” when “gentlemen often had _two_ eggs for breakfast and lots of other things as well,” when “Mummy could buy anything she liked in shops, and nearly everybody had motors.”
Tall and pale was Alison, with straight black hair that reached her waist. She took the war very seriously indeed, and was implacable in her conviction that nothing else mattered. She was even rather shocked that mummy could take comfort in the thought that it would probably be over before Jasper was old enough to join up.
He was an American and the same age as Alison and lived quite near, though after the unfriendly fashion of London, they might never have known him but that it happened his mummy and theirs worked at the same hospital.
He was an “only,” and when they first knew him went as a day boy to a preparatory school quite a long way off; but as time went on and transport of every kind became more crowded and difficult, he came to do lessons with Alison and Barbara.
Nothing made Barbara so happy as to be allowed to visit the “dear poor ones” in the hospital where mummy worked; but when she first saw the blind soldiers from St. Dunstan’s and they were explained to her, it seemed as though she really could not bear the knowledge. The children lived on the south side of Regent’s Park, and Nannie always took them there for their walks.
“Will they never be able to see?” she would ask piteously.
“I fear not in this life,” was Nannie’s invariable answer.
“Nothing at all. But they are very brave, Miss Barbara; _they_ don’t cry.”
For days after when Barbara met them in Regent’s Park, her mouth would go down at the corners, and though she did not actually cry she was, as nurse said, “queer and quiet” for a long time afterward. Their inexorable doom weighed on her little soul, and even her serene faith in a kind God and protecting angels and the “tender Shepherd” of her prayers was somewhat shaken that such a cruel thing could be. Ah! if they could only have met _Him_! He would have “touched their eyes” and all would have been well. Perhaps some day---- In the meantime the fairies--and she believed in them as firmly as in the heavenly hierarchy itself--came to her aid, and by some process of reasoning she decided that the blinded soldiers were under an enchantment. That a wicked ogre, a German ogre, had taken away their sight (even as trolls and cruel step-mothers and evilly disposed fairies blinded her favorite heroes in the “Tales from the Norse”), but that some day a kind fairy or wise, friendly beast would put them in the way of getting their eyes back again. Surely among all the animals in the Zoo there would be one who knew exactly under what tree in the Park the healing dew might be found.