“It is not safe to stay,” said her friends.  “You will be practically a prisoner of war.  You will be at the mercy of the Turks.  You know what the Turk is—­as treacherous as he is cruel.  They can, if they wish, rob you or deport you anywhere they like.  Go now while the path is open—­before it is too late.  You are in the very middle of Turkey, hundreds of miles from any help.  The dangers are terrible.”

As soon as she was well enough Miss Cushman went to the Turkish Governor of Konia, a bitter Mohammedan who had organised the massacre of forty thousand Armenians, to say that she had been asked to go back to America.

“What shall you do if I stay?” she asked.

“I beg you to stay,” said the Governor.  “You shall be protected.  You need have no fear.”

“Your words are beautiful,” she replied.  “But if American and Turkey go to war you will deport me.”

If she stayed she knew the risks under his rule.  She was still weak from her illness.  There was no colleague by her side to help her.  There seemed to be every reason why she should sail away back to America.  But as she sat thinking it over she saw before her the hospital full of wounded soldiers, the six hundred orphans who looked to her for help, the plain of a hundred villages to which she was sending food.  No one could take her place.

Yet she was weak and tired after her illness and, in America, rest and home, friends and safety called to her.

“It was,” she wrote later to her friends, “a heavy problem to know what to do with the orphans and other helpless people who depended on me for life.”

What would you have done?  What do you think she did?  For what reason should she face these perils?

Not in the heat of battle, but in cool quiet thought, all alone among enemies, she saw her path and took it.  She did not count her life her own.  She was ready to give her life for her friends of all nations.  She decided to stay in the heart of the enemies’ country and serve her God and the children.  Many a man has had the cross of Honour for an act that called for less calm courage.  That deed showed her to be one of the great undecorated heroes and heroines of the lonely path.

So she stayed on.

From all over the Turkish Empire prisoners were sent to Konia.  There was great confusion in dealing with them, so the people of Konia asked Miss Cushman to look after them; they even wrote to the Turkish Government at Constantinople to tell them to write to her to invite her to do this work.  There was a regular hue and cry that she should be appointed, because everyone knew her strong will, her power of organising, her just treatment, her good judgment, and her loving heart.  So at last she accepted the invitation.  Prisoners of eleven different nationalities she helped—­including British, French, Italian, Russian, Indians and Arabs.  She arranged for the nursing of the sick, the feeding of the hungry, the freeing of some from prison.