Jane least of any would have thought what was coming to pass.  The pale square-browed young officer, so little Irish and winning in his brevity of speech, did and said nothing to alarm her or strike the smallest light.  Grace Barrow noticed certain little changes of mood in Jane she could scarcely have had a distinct suspicion at the time.  After a recent observation of him, on an evening stroll from Lappett’s to Woodside, she pronounced him interesting, but hard.  ’He has an interesting head . . .  I should not like to offend him.’  They agreed as to his unlikeness to fluid Patrick; both eulogistic of the absent brother; and Jane, who could be playful in privacy with friends, clapped a brogue on her tongue to discourse of Patrick and apostrophise him:  ’Oh!  Pat, Pat, my dear cousin Pat! why are you so long away from your desponding Jane?  I ’ll take to poetry and write songs, if you don’t come home soon.  You’ve put seas between us, and are behaving to me as an enemy.  I know you ’ll bring home a foreign Princess to break the heart of your faithful.  But I’ll always praise you for a dear boy, Pat, and wish you happy, and beg the good gentleman your brother to give me a diploma as nurse to your first-born.  There now!’

She finished smiling brightly, and Grace was a trifle astonished, for her friend’s humour was not as a rule dramatic.

’You really have caught a twang of it from your friend Captain Con; only you don’t rattle the eighteenth letter of the alphabet in the middle of words.’

’I’ve tried, and can’t persuade my tongue to do it “first off,” as boys say, and my invalid has no brogue whatever to keep me in practice,’ Jane replied.  ’One wonders what he thinks of as he lies there by the window.  He doesn’t confide it to his hospital nurse.’

‘Yes, he would treat her courteously, just in that military style,’ said Grace, realising the hospital attendance.

’It ’s the style I like best:—­no perpetual personal thankings and allusions to the trouble he gives!’ Jane exclaimed.  ’He shows perfect good sense, and I like that in all things, as you know.  A red-haired young woman chooses to wait on him and bring him flowers—­he’s brother to Patrick in his love of wild flowers, at all events!—­and he takes it naturally and simply.  These officers bear illness well.  I suppose it ‘s the drill.’

‘Still I think it a horrid profession, dear.’

Grace felt obliged to insist on that:  and her ‘I think,’ though it was not stressed, tickled Jane’s dormant ear to some drowsy wakefulness.

’I think too much honour is paid to it, certainly.  But soldiers, of all men, one would expect to be overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness.  He has never complained; not once.  I doubt if he would have complained if Mrs. Adister had been waiting on him all the while, or not a soul.  I can imagine him lying on the battle-field night after night quietly, resolving not to groan.’