steady way, she realized. Her letter must be final.

It had to be final. Was not Peggy coming at three o'clock?

Again Doggie thought, somewhat wistfully, of the old care-free, full
physical life, and again he murmured:

"It's all dam funny!"

* * * * *

Peggy stood for a moment at the door scanning the ward; then
perceiving him, she marched down with a defiant glance at nurses and
blue-uniformed comrades and men in bed and other strangers, swung a
chair and established herself by his bedside.

"You dear old thing, I couldn't bear to think of you lying here
alone," she said, with the hurry that seeks to cover shyness. "I had
to come. Mother's gone _fut_ and can't travel, and Dad's running all
the parsons' shows in the district. Otherwise one of them would have
come too."

"It's awfully good of you, Peggy," he said, with a smile, for fair and
flushed she was pleasant to look upon. "But it must have been a
fiendish journey."

"Rotten!" said Peggy. "But that's a trifle. You're the all-important
thing. Tell me straight. You're not badly hurt, are you?"

"Lord, no," he replied cheerfully. "Just the fleshy part of the leg--a
clean bullet-wound. Bone touched; but they say I'll be fit quite
soon."

"Sure? They're not going to cut off your leg or do anything horrid?"

He laughed. "Sure," said he.

"That's all right."

There was a pause. Now that they had met they seemed to have little to
say. She looked around. Presently she remarked:

"Everything looks quite fresh and clean."

"It's perfect."

"Rather public, though," said Peggy.

"Publicity is the paradoxical condition of the private's life,"
laughed Doggie.

Another pause.

"Well, how are you feeling?"

"First-rate," said Doggie. "It's nothing to fuss over. I hope to be
out again in a month or two."

"Out where?"

"In France--with the regiment."

Peggy drew a little breath of astonishment and sat up on her chair.
His surprising statement seemed to have broken up the atmosphere of
restraint.

"Do you mean to say you _want_ to go back to the trenches?"

Conscientious Doggie knitted his brows. A fervent "Yes" would proclaim
him a modern Paladin, eager to slay Huns. Now, as a patriotic
Englishman he loved Huns to be slain, but as the survivor of James
Marmaduke Trevor, dilettante expert on the theorbo and the viol da
gamba and owner of the peacock and ivory room in Denby Hall, to say
nothing of the collector of li