“I just got on with my job—­like dozens of other fellows,” was all he would say.

It was from a brother officer that Sara learned, later, than Tim had “got on with his job” under a hellish enemy fire, in spite of being twice wounded; and had thus saved the immediate situation in his vicinity—­and, incidentally, the lives of many of his comrades.

He seemed to Sara to have become at once both older and younger than in former days.  He had all the hilarious good spirits evinced by nine out of ten of the boys who came home on leave—­the cheery capacity to laugh at the hardships and dangers of the front, to poke good-natured fun at “old Fritz” and to make a jest of the German shells and the Flanders mud, treating the whole great adventure of war as though it were the finest game invented.

Yet back of the mirth and laughter in the blue eyes lurked something new and strange and grave—­inexpressibly touching—­that indefinable something which one senses shrinkingly in the young eyes of the boys who have come back.

It hurt Sara somehow—­that look of which she caught glimpses now and then, in quiet moments, and she set herself to drive it away, or, at least, to keep it at bay as much as possible, by filling every available moment with occupation or amusement.

“I don’t want him to think about what it was like—­out there,” she told Molly.  “His eyes make my heart ache, sometimes.  They’re too young to have seen—­such things.  Suggest something we can play at to-day!”

So they threw themselves, heart and soul, into the task of entertaining Tim, and, since he was very willing to be entertained, the weeks at Sunnyside slipped by in a little whirl of gaiety, winding up with a badminton tournament, at which Tim—­whose right arm had not yet quite recovered from the effects of the German bullet it had stopped—­played a left-handed game, and triumphantly maneuvered himself and his partner into the semi-finals.

Probably—­leniently handicapped, as they were, in the circumstances—­they would have won the tournament, but that, unluckily, in leaping to reach a shuttle soaring high above his head, Tim somehow missed his footing and came down heavily, with his leg twisted underneath him.

“Broken ankle,” announced Selwyn briefly, when he had made his examination.

Tim opened his eyes—­he had lost consciousness, momentarily, from the pain.

“Damn!” he observed succinctly.  “That’ll make it the very devil of a time before I can get back to France!” Then, to Sara, who could be heard murmuring something about writing to Elisabeth:  “Not much, old thing, you don’t!  She’d fuss herself, no end.  Just write—­and say—­it’s a sprain.”  And he promptly fainted again.

They got him back to Sunnyside while he was still unconscious, and when he returned to an intelligent understanding of material matters, he found himself in bed, with a hump-like excrescence in front of him keeping the weight of the bedclothes from the injured limb.