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.’

’Too great a power of self-repression sometimes argues the want of any emotional nature,’ said Grace.

Jane shook her head.  She knew a story of him contradicting that.

The story had not recurred to her since she had undertaken her service.  It coloured the remainder of an evening walk home through the beechwoods and over the common with Grace, and her walk across the same tracks early in the morning, after Grace had gone to London.  Miss Colesworth was coming to her next week, with her brother if he had arrived in England.  Jane remembered having once been curious about this adventurous man of Letters who lived by the work of his pen.  She remembered comparing him to one who was compelled to swim perpetually without a ship to give him rest or land in view.  He had made a little money by a book, and was expending it on travels—­rather imprudently, she fancied Emma Colesworth to be thinking.  He talked well, but for the present she was happier in her prospect of nearly a week of loneliness.  The day was one of sunshine, windless, odorous:  one of the rare placid days of April when the pettish month assumes a matronly air of summer and wears it till the end of the day.  The beech twigs were strongly embrowned,