“Sure,” returned the young man, with an infectious laugh.  “A young surgeon never has much else when he starts, nor for some time to come.  Want to sit up?”

“Why,” Allison breathed, in astonishment, “I can’t.”

“Who said so?”

“Everybody.  They all said I must lie perfectly still.”

“Of course,” mused the young man, aloud, “blood may move around all right of itself, and then again, it may not.  Wouldn’t do any harm to stir it up a bit and remind the red corpuscles not to loaf on the job.”

The nurse came back, to say that the trunk would be up immediately.

“Good.  Can I have a bunk in the next room?” Without waiting for her answer, he requested raw eggs and milk, beaten up with a little cream and sherry.

While Allison was drinking it, he moved a big easy chair up near the window, opened every shutter wide, and let the hot sun stream into the room.  He expeditiously made a sling for the injured hand, slipped it painlessly into place, put a strong arm under Allison’s shoulders, and lifted him to a sitting posture on the edge of the bed.  “Now then, forward, march!  Just lean on me.”

Muscles long unused trembled under the strain but finally he made the harbour of the easy chair, gasping for breath.  “Good,” said the young man.  “At this rate, we’ll soon have clothes on us and be outdoors.”

“Really?” asked Allison, scarcely daring to believe his ears.

“Sure,” replied the marvellous young man, confidently.  “What’s the use of keeping a whole body in the house on account of one hand?  I’m going to tell you just one thing more, then we’ll quit talking shop and proceed to politics or anything else you like.

“I knew a man once who was a trapeze performer in a circus and he was training his son in the same lofty profession.  The boy insisted that he couldn’t do it, and finally the man said to him:  ’Look here, kid, if you’ll put your heart over the bar, your body will follow all right,’ and sure enough it did.  Now you get your heart over the bar, and trust your hand to follow.  Get the idea?”

The sound of the piano below chimed in with the answer.  A rippling, laughing melody danced up the stairs and into the room.  The young man listened a moment, then asked, “Who?”

“A friend of mine—­my very dearest friend.”

“More good business.  I think I’ll go down and talk to her.  What’s her name?”

“Rose.”

“What’s the rest of it?  I can’t start in that way, you know.  Bad form.”

“Bernard—­Rose Bernard.”

As quickly and silently as he did everything else, the young man went down-stairs, and the piano stopped, but only for a moment, as he requested her, with an airy wave of the hand, not to mind him.  When she finished the old song she was playing, he called her by name, introduced himself, and invited her out into the garden, because, as he said, “walls not only have ears, but telephones.”