“Dunny,” I said weakly, but sternly, “you didn’t bring me up to tell whoppers, not bare-faced ones like that, anyhow, that wouldn’t deceive the veriest child.  What earthly business could you have over here in war-time?  Own up, now, and take your medicine like a man.”

His guilty air was sufficient answer.

“Well, Dev,” he acknowledged, “it was your cable.  That Gibraltar mess was a nasty one, and I didn’t like its looks.  I’m getting old, and you’re all I’ve got; so I took a passport and caught the Rochambeau.  Not, of course, that I doubted your ability to take care of yourself, my boy—­”

“Didn’t you?  You might have,” I admitted with some ruefulness, “if you had known I was bucking both the Allied governments and the picked talent of the Central powers.  It was too much.  I was riding for a fall, and I got it.  But I don’t mind saying, Dunny, I’m infernally glad you came.”

He wiped his eyes.

“Well, you go to sleep now,” he counseled gruffly.  “You’ve got to get well in a hurry; there’s work for you to do!  All sorts of things have been happening since that obus knocked you out.  Just a week ago, for instance, the President went before Congress and—­”

“What’s that you say?  Not war?”

“Yes, war, young man!  We’re in it at last, up to our necks; in it with men and ships and munitions and foodstuffs and everything else we have to help with, praise the Lord!  You’ll fight beneath the Stars and Stripes, instead of under the Tricolor.  I say, Dev, that’s positively the last word I’ll utter.  You’ve got to rest!”

In a weak, quavering fashion, but with sincere enthusiasm, I tried to celebrate by singing a few bars of the “Star-Spangled Banner” and a little of the “Marseillaise.”  Dunny was right, however; the conversation had exhausted me.  In the midst of my patriotic demonstration I fell asleep.

My convalescence was a marvel, I learned from young Dr. Raimbault, the surgeon from the chateau who came to see me every day.  According to him, I was a patient in a hundred, in a thousand; he never wearied of admiring my constitution, which he described by the various French equivalents of “as hard as nails.”  Not a set-back attended the course of my recovery.  First, I sat propped up in bed; then I attained the dignity of an arm-chair; later, slowly and painfully, I began to drag myself about the room.  But the day on which my physician’s rapture burst all bounds was the great one when I crawled from the pavilion, gained a bench beneath the trees, and sat enthroned, glaring at my crutches.  They were detestable implements; I longed to smash them.  And they would, the doctor airily informed me, be my portion for three months.