“Does the light hurt your eyes?  Let me put up one of the blinds for a moment, because I want you to see these flowers.  I’ve brought you my first sweet peas.”

Claude blinked at the bunch of bright colours she held out before him.  She put them up to his face and asked him if he could smell them through his medicines.  In a moment he ceased to feel embarrassed.  His mother brought a glass bowl, and Enid arranged the flowers on the little table beside him.

“Now, do you want me to darken the room again?”

“Not yet.  Sit down for a minute and talk to me.  I can’t say much because my face is stiff.”

“I should think it would be!  I met Leonard Dawson on the road yesterday, and he told me how you worked in the field after you were cut.  I would like to scold you hard, Claude.”

“Do.  It might make me feel better.”  He took her hand and kept her beside him a moment.  “Are those the sweet peas you were planting that day when I came back from the West?”

“Yes.  Haven’t they done well to blossom so early?”

“Less than two months.  That’s strange,” he sighed.

“Strange?  What?”

“Oh, that a handful of seeds can make anything so pretty in a few weeks, and it takes a man so long to do anything and then it’s not much account.”

“That’s not the way to look at things,” she said reprovingly.

Enid sat prim and straight on a chair at the foot of his bed.  Her flowered organdie dress was very much like the bouquet she had brought, and her floppy straw hat had a big lilac bow.  She began to tell Claude about her father’s several attacks of erysipelas.  He listened but absently.  He would never have believed that Enid, with her severe notions of decorum, would come into his room and sit with him like this.  He noticed that his mother was quite as much astonished as he.  She hovered about the visitor for a few moments, and then, seeing that Enid was quite at her ease, went downstairs to her work.  Claude wished that Enid would not talk at all, but would sit there and let him look at her.  The sunshine she had let into the room, and her tranquil, fragrant presence, soothed him.  Presently he realized that she was asking him something.

“What is it, Enid?  The medicine they give me makes me stupid.  I don’t catch things.”

“I was asking whether you play chess.”

“Very badly.”

“Father says I play passably well.  When you are better you must let me bring up my ivory chessmen that Carrie sent me from China.  They are beautifully carved.  And now it’s time for me to go.”

She rose and patted his hand, telling him he must not be foolish about seeing people.  “I didn’t know you were so vain.  Bandages are as becoming to you as they are to anybody.  Shall I pull the dark blind again for you?”

“Yes, please.  There won’t be anything to look at now.”

“Why, Claude, you are getting to be quite a ladies’ man!”