He came over to her and sat on the arm of her chair, as he used to do when he was a boy.
"They were forwarded--at intervals," he remarked coolly. "Have you never, Nell, wanted to run away for a bit and find yourself naked, out in the open?" And then, airily, he began to hum that graceless ditty of young subalterns at Pekin when the Embassy had been relieved and the Summer Palace occupied, and the allied army amused itself with burlesques on the vanished foe:
"'Fancy me, in this frosty weather.
Posing as Venus among the heather;
Fancy me in the altogether,
At my time of life!'"
"Really, Ned!" exclaimed Helen, unable to repress her smiles, "You are the most ridiculous boy. But if I am to see the domain it is time I began. I must be back by five o'clock."
They were but just in time when he set her down at the hospital and sought out Dr. Ramsay.
He found him writing for dear life, his face positively aglow with vitality and fire.
"Smashing 'em up?" asked Ned, after the first welcome was over and he had lit a cigarette.
Peter Ramsay shifted the papers a trifle shamefacedly. "Yes!" he replied; "it isn't a bit of good, of course; but it relieves my feelings and hurts theirs."
"How did it come about?"