“I like the little pale brown one; she’s like a mouse.”

“There’s no comparison.  Ours is the star turn.”

“Which is ours?”

“The one who dashes about?”

“The one who upset the dinner-trays?”

“Yes.  Wasn’t it funny?  I thought I should have died!”

The Doctors, this time civilians, used to come to him twice a day.  They were quiet, reserved men, positively glowing with efficiency.

They dressed his wound, tested the reflex actions of his nerves, gazed through holes in bright mirrors at his eyes, and made him watch perpendicular pencils moving horizontally across his line of vision.

But life was racing back into his limbs.  Hourly his strength was returning.  He no longer lay staring listlessly in the bottom of the bed.  He liked now to work himself up, to lose nothing of what was going on around, to share in the talk, and, until the next headache came, to live.

He wallowed in the joy of reaching harbour.

Such rapid progress did he make that they began, in a few days, to treat him as a rational human being.  They allowed him meat, and once, owing to a mistake on the part of the young Hurrier, a whisky-and-soda.  They allowed him to smoke a restricted number of cigarettes, and to read as often as he liked.  But aspirin they barred.

He had not many friends in London, so during visiting hours he was left in comparative peace.

One morning his mother came.  As the door opened and she hurried into the room with her quick, bird-like grace, he felt that she was a stranger to him.  Somehow their old intimacy seemed dissolved, and would have, piece by piece, to be built up again.  Her round, appealing eyes of palest brown stirred him as no other eyes—­even her own—­had ever done before.

Her slim shoulders delighted him.

“Waddles!” he said; “you’re priceless!”

He loved to call her “Waddles.”

They asked the Doctor when he would be likely to be able to go home.

“As soon as the wound is covered over,” he replied, “there is no reason why he should not go home.  Providing he could get massage and proper treatment.”

* * * * *

The gas darkly illuminated the sombre red of the walls and glimmered on the polished mahogany.  The fire, too, glowed red.  Outside, the wind was sighing softly in the pine-trees.

The bed seemed huge and its capacity for comfort enormous.  The cool sheets seemed to caress his legs.  His whole nervous system was delightfully wearied with the achievement of reaching home.

The local Doctor had promised that he could treat him perfectly well, and he had been allowed to leave the Hospital.

He could hear the paws of his spaniel padding softly on the carpet in the landing.  He could hear the voices of his father and sister in the hall....

Peace after the storm!  The harbour reached at last.