“Everybody is very nice to me,” said Jimmy contentedly.  “When my father comes back I shall tell him.  He is very fond of people who are kind to me.  There was a woman on the ship—­What is bulging your pocket, Peter?”

“My handkerchief.”

“That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief.”

Peter was injured.  He scowled ferociously at being doubted and stood up before the wheeled chair to be searched.  The ward watched joyously, while from pocket after pocket of Peter’s old gray suit came Jimmy’s salvage—­two nuts, a packet of figs, a postcard that represented a stout colonel of hussars on his back on a frozen lake, with a private soldier waiting to go through the various salutations due his rank before assisting him.  A gala day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the little mountain town with only a name on the cross at its head, and if one did not notice that the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands soon tired of playing and lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet, who was much inured to death and lived her days with tragedy, caught him to her almost fiercely as she lifted him back from the chair into the smooth white bed.

He fell asleep with Peter’s arm under his head and the horns of the deer beside him.  On the bedside stand stood the wooden sentry, keeping guard.  As Peter drew his arm away he became aware of the Nurse Elisabet beckoning to him from a door at the end of the ward Peter left the sentinel on guard and tiptoed down the room.  Just outside, round a corner, was the Dozent’s laboratory, and beyond the tiny closet where he slept, where on a stand was the photograph of the lady he would marry when he had become a professor and required no one’s consent.

The Dozent was waiting for Peter.  In the amiable conspiracy which kept the boy happy he was arch-plotter.  His familiarity with Austrian intrigue had made him invaluable.  He it was who had originated the idea of making Jimmy responsible for the order of the ward, so that a burly Trager quarreling over his daily tobacco with the nurse in charge, or brawling over his soup with another patient, was likely to be hailed in a thin soprano, and to stand, grinning sheepishly, while Jimmy, in mixed English and German, restored the decorum of the ward.  They were a quarrelsome lot, the convalescents.  Jimmy was so busy some days settling disputes and awarding decisions that he slept almost all night.  This was as it should be.

The Dozent waited for Peter.  His red beard twitched and his white coat, stained from the laboratory table, looked quite villainous.  He held out a letter.

“This has come for the child,” he said in quite good English.  He was obliged to speak English.  Day by day he taught in the clinics Americans who scorned his native tongue, and who brought him the money with which some day he would marry.  He liked the English language; he liked Americans because they learned quickly.  He held out an envelope with a black border and Peter took it.