His nurse was at supper, so he was mercifully free; moreover it was the
emptiest time of day for out-of-doors. A few straggling patients were
knocking prescribed golf-balls about the links, and a scattering of nurses
were hurrying in with their wheel-chairs. Half-way between the links and
the last building was the pond, shaded by pines and flanked by a miniature
rustic rest-house, and thither Peter went. On a willow stump emerging from
the pond he found Hennessy, as wrinkled as a butternut, with a thatch of
gray hair, a mouth shirred into a small, open ellipse, and eyes full of
irrepressible twinkles. He was seated tailor fashion on the stump, a tin
platter of bread across his knees and the swans circling about him. He
looked every whit as Irish as his name, and he was scolding and blarneying
the birds by turn.

"Go-wan, there, ye feathered heathen! Can't ye be lettin' them that has
good manners get a morsel once in a while? Faith, ye'll be havin' old Doc
Willum afther ye with his stomach cure if ye don't watch out." He looked
over his shoulder and caught Peter's gaze. "Sure, birds or humans, they
all have to be coaxed or scolded into keepin' healthy, I'm thinkin', and
Hennessy's head nurse to the swans," he ended, with a chuckle.

But there was something quite different on Peter's mind. "Has one of the
patients--a young person in gray--been here lately? I mean have you seen
her about any time?"

Hennessy shook a puzzled head. "A young gray patient, ye say? Sure there
might be a hundred--that's not over-distinguishin'. I leave it to ye, sir,
just a gray patient is not over-distinguishin'."

Peter reflected. "It was a quiet, cloister kind of gray, but her eyes were
not--cloistered. They were the shiningest--"

A chuckle from Hennessy brought him to an abrupt finish. "Eyes? Gray?
Patient? Ha, ha! Did ye hear that, Brian Boru?" and he flicked his cap at
a gray swan. "Sure, misther, that's no patient. 'Tis Leerie--herself."

"Leerie?" The name sounded absurd to Peter, and slightly reminiscent of
something, he could not tell what.

"Aye, Leerie. Real name, Sheila O'Leary--as good a name as Hennessy. But
they named her Leerie her probation year. In course she's Irish an' not
Scotch, an' I never heard tell of a lass afore that went 'round
a-lightin' street lamps, but for all that the name fits. Ye mind grown-ups
an' childher alike watch for her to come 'round."

"A nurse," repeated Peter, dully.

"Aye. An' she com