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 The girls in Wallbridge, as the war persisted, became more and more possessed with a desire to serve, and in some more personal way than rolling bandages or writing letters to unknown soldiers. Several became nurses and joined hospital units going to France; others secretaries, or war-time workers of one kind and another, and went to Washington. But nothing in the way of service that necessitated absence from home was to be thought of as far as Sheilah was concerned. Her father hadn't been very well lately, and such a look of distress would cross her mother's face, if she even referred to leaving home, that Sheilah put all hope of it out of her mind. But the prick that she wasn't doing her share recurred again and again.

In the fall of 1916 came the news of the death in action of Nevin Baldwin. It stirred the city to its depths. His mother in her deep mourning became a symbol epitomizing all the mourning mothers on the other side. The reality of the war struck deep into every woman's heart in Wallbridge.

Within a fortnight after the news of the death of Nevin Baldwin, Millicent Phillips, a friend of Sheilah's and her own age, sailed for England with 'her mother, to be married quietly to one of the boys who had enlisted in the Canadian Army. Three months later, Millicent Phillips—Millicent Blake then—was wearing mourning also.