hich the doctor looked wise and sagely winked.
When that able practitioner returned to the cottage two young women with
Red Cross badges were seated on the veranda, just in from a drive,
apparently, and a dark-eyed little chap in the uniform of a subaltern of
the cavalry was with them. They had drawn their chairs into the shade
and close to the Venetian blinds, behind which in his darkened room
reclined the languid patient.
"That will drive him simply rabid," said the doctor to himself, and
prepared a professional smile with which to tell the glad tidings that
he should be borne forthwith to higher regions.
He had left Stuyvesant peevish, fretful, but otherwise inert, asking
only to be spared from intrusion. He found him alert, attent, eager, his
eyes kindling, his cheeks almost flushing. The instant the doctor began
to speak the patient checked him and bent his ear to the sound of soft
voices and laughter from without.
"I've fixed it all," whispered the medical man reassuringly. "We'll move
you in a minute--just as soon as I can call in another man or two," and
he started for the door, whereat his erratic patient again uplifted a
hand and beckoned, and the doctor tip-toed to his side and bent his ear
and looked puzzled, perturbed, but finally pleased. Stuyvesant said
that, thinking it all over, he "guessed" he would rather stay where he
was.
And then, when the doctor was gone, what did he do but take a brace in
his chair and bid the attendant go out and say to the officer on the
veranda, Lieutenant Ray, that Mr. Stuyvesant would be very glad to speak
with him if he'd be so kind as to come in, whereat the soft laughter
suddenly ceased.
There was a sound of light footsteps going in one direction and a
springy, soldierly step coming in the other. Then entered Mr. Sanford
Ray, with outstretched hands, and the attendant, following and peering
over his shoulder, marvelled at the sudden change that had come over his
master.
Three days later, when the City of Sacramento was pronounced ready to
proceed, and the officers and Red Cross nurses _en route_ to Manila were
warned to rejoin the ship, Lieutenant Stuyvesant "shook," so to speak,
his civil physician, persuaded the army surgeons with the fleet that a
sea-voyage was all he needed to make a new man of him, and was carried
aboard the Sacramento and given an airy stateroom on the upper deck,
vacated in his favor by one of the ship's officers,--consideration not
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