This Personage gazed upon the visitor with a suspicious and disapproving look.
"I wonder why? It isn't because I'm not blamelessly tidy for once in my life, and she can't guess that the furs and the brown velvet suit are cast-offs from the opulent," thought the visitor swiftly. Aloud she added in her clear, nonchalant tone: "I have come to see Mr. Scott, please."
"There is the visiting-hour. It is not quite three yet," said the nurse forbiddingly.
"I'll wait, then," said the visitor. For two minutes she waited. Then the nurse approached her with a note-book and a pencil.
"Will you write your name down here?" she said austerely. And upon a page inscribed "Mr. M. Scott" the visitor wrote her name, "Miss Leslie Long."
"Will you come up?" the nurse said reluctantly. And Leslie ascended a broad red-carpeted stairway, and was shown into a great room of parquet floors and long windows and painted panels that had been a drawing-room, and that was now turned by a row of small beds on great castors and by several screens into a hospital-ward.
A blonde youth in a pink pyjama jacket, and with his arm in a black silken sling, was sitting up in bed and chatting to a white-moustached gentleman beside him; another of the wounded was sitting by one of the great fire-places, reading; a couple were playing picquet in a corner, under a smiling Academy portrait of the mistress of the mansion.
"Mr. Scott is sitting up to-day, in the ante-room," vouchsafed the nurse. And Leslie Long entered, through a connecting door, a small room to the right.
One wall of it was hung with a drapery of ancient brown tapestry, showing giant figures amidst giant foliage; beneath it was a low couch. Upon this, covered with a black, panther-skin rug, there lay, half sitting up, supported on his elbow, the young wounded officer whom Leslie had come to see.
"Frightfully good of you, this," he said cheerfully, as she appeared.