Peter showed his teeth. "I'm sitting up and taking nourishment. Probably before the end of the week you'll see me in shorts and a zephyr sprinting round the park before breakfast."
"I'd like to," said Graham, and he held out his hand.
Peter took it and gave it a scrunch which had in it nothing of the invalid. "Give my love to the subway," he said, "and my kind regards to Wall Street."
Graham grinned, waved his hand and left the room. He found it necessary to blow his nose rather hard on his way down-stairs. "Oh, Gee!" he said to himself. "Oh, Gee! Only think if Peter had—" He didn't allow himself to finish the thought.
And then came Betty, and the way in which she and Peter came together—the way in which they stood only a step or two from the door, inarticulate in their love and thankfulness, was too much even for the trained nurse, to whom love and death and the great hereafter were mere commonplaces. She withdrew to the dressing-room and stayed there for a whole solid quarter-of-an-hour, eliminating herself with a tactfulness for which Peter blessed her and Betty became her friend for all time.
"My baby!" said Peter. "We shall have to begin all over again. We're almost strangers."
But Betty shook her head. "No," she said. "No. There hasn't been one moment during all this time that I haven't been with you."
And Peter nodded. "That's dead true," he said.
And then they sat down very close together and the things they said to each other are lost to the world, because we joined the nurse in the next room and shut the door.