"Don't listen to him, Miss Bright," Jack interrupted.
"—So in sheer desperation he turned nurse to Squawk and ran errands for its mother, wondering the while how it was that some men had all the luck!"
"Draw it mild, I say!"
"And now he sits up half the night composing odes to her eyebrows and boring me stiff with his sighs."
"Liar!" laughed Jack. "I couldn't write poetry to save my life."
"It doesn't prevent him from trying. Then there's her photograph——"
"It isn't hers, I told you!" Jack protested. "Tommy, you're a villain."
"It's jolly like her, what I saw of it when it fell out from under your pillow."
By this time Jack was crimson. He relapsed into sulky silence and devoted himself to his plate with appetite. Honor Bright wanted no better evidence of the fact that he was heart-whole, though she continued to wonder whose was the photograph he was treasuring so sentimentally.
Dinner progressed through its many courses towards dessert, when toasts were drunk to "Absent Ones," and "Sweethearts and Wives,"—the usual conclusion to dinners at the Brights'; then, with a loud scraping of chairs, the ladies rose and filed out of the room.