id, "THAT job's done. It's a nice clean fracture, and it'll
go on all right, I've no doubt. Plucky young chap, too--hullo! what's
all this?"

His eye had fallen on Peter who lay mousy-still in his bonds on the
settle.

"Playing at prisoners, eh?" he said; but his eyebrows had gone up a
little. Somehow he had not thought that Bobbie would be playing while in
the room above someone was having a broken bone set.

"Oh, no!" said Bobbie, "not at PRISONERS. We were playing at setting
bones. Peter's the broken boner, and I was the doctor."

The Doctor frowned.

"Then I must say," he said, and he said it rather sternly, "that's it's
a very heartless game. Haven't you enough imagination even to faintly
picture what's been going on upstairs? That poor chap, with the drops
of sweat on his forehead, and biting his lips so as not to cry out, and
every touch on his leg agony and--"

"YOU ought to be tied up," said Phyllis; "you're as bad as--"

"Hush," said Bobbie; "I'm sorry, but we weren't heartless, really."

"I was, I suppose," said Peter, crossly. "All right, Bobbie, don't you
go on being noble and screening me, because I jolly well won't have it.
It was only that I kept on talking about blood and wounds. I wanted to
train them for Red Cross Nurses. And I wouldn't stop when they asked
me."

"Well?" said Dr. Forrest, sitting down.

"Well--then I said, 'Let's play at setting bones.' It was all rot. I
knew Bobbie wouldn't. I only said it to tease her. And then when she
said 'yes,' of course I had to go through with it. And they tied me up.
They got it out of Stalky. And I think it's a beastly shame."

He managed to writhe over and hide his face against the wooden back of
the settle.

"I didn't think that anyone would know but us," said Bobbie, indignantly
answering Peter's unspoken reproach. "I never thought of your coming in.
And hearing about blood and wounds does really make me feel most awfully
funny. It was only a joke our tying him up. Let me untie you, Pete."

"I don't care if you never untie me," said Peter; "and if that's your
idea of a joke--"

"If I were you," said the Doctor, though really he did not quite know
what to say, "I should be untied before your Mother comes down. You
don't want to worry her just now, do you?"

"I don't promise anything about not saying about wounds, mind," said
Peter, in very surly tones, as Bobbie and Phyllis began to untie the
knots.

"I'm very sorry, Pete," Bobbie whis