After lunch I went to the hospital for the weekly committee meeting.  To my amazement the first person I met in the corridor was Betty—­Betty, white as wax, with black rings round unnaturally shining eyes.  She waited for me to wheel myself up to her.  I said severely: 

“What on earth are you doing here?  Go home to bed at once.”

She put her hand on the back of my chair and bent down.

“I’m better here.  And so are the dear roses.  Come and see them.”

I followed her into one of the military wards on the ground floor, and the place was a feast of roses.  I had no idea so many could have come from my little garden.  And the ward upstairs, she told me, was similarly beflowered.  By the side of each man’s bed stood bowl or vase, and the tables and the window sills were bright with blooms.  It was the ward for serious cases—­men with faces livid from gas-poisoning, men with the accursed trench nephritis, men with faces swathed in bandages hiding God knows what distortions, men with cradles over them betokening mangled limbs, men recovering from operations, chiefly the picking of bits of shrapnel and splinters of bone from shattered arms and legs; men with pale faces, patient eyes, and with cheery smiles round their lips when we passed by.  A gramophone at the end of the room was grinding out a sentimental tune to which all were listening with rapt enjoyment.  I asked one man, among others, how he was faring.  He was getting on fine.  With the death-rattle in his throat the wounded British soldier invariably tells you that he is getting on fine.

“And ain’t these roses lovely?  Makes the place look like a garden.  And that music—­seems appropriate, don’t it, sir?”

I asked what the gramophone was playing.  He looked respectfully shocked.

“Why, it’s ‘The Rosary,’ sir.”

After we had left him, Betty said: 

“That’s the third time they’ve asked for it to-day.  They’ve got mixed up with the name, you see.  They’re beautiful children, aren’t they?”

I should have called them sentimental idiots, but Betty saw much clearer than I did.  She accompanied me back to the corridor and to the Committee Room door.  I was a quarter of an hour late.

“I’ve kept the precious Rayon d’Ors for myself,” she said.  “How could you have the heart to cut them?”

“I would have cut out my heart itself, for the matter of that,” said I, “if it would have done any good.”

She smiled in a forlorn kind of way.

“Don’t do that, for I shall want it inside you more than ever now.  Tell me, how is Tufton?”

“Tufton—?”

“Yes—­Tufton.”

I must confess that my mind being so full of Betty, I had clean forgotten Tufton.  But Betty remembered.

I smiled.  “He’s getting on fine,” said I. I reached out my hand and held her cold, slim fingers.  “Promise me one thing, my dear.”

“All right,” she said.