Very likely they were right. Hadn't he imagined that he could see the interior of the ward and how Henriette looked when she bent over him to write on his arm? Hadn't he sometimes heard her steps in imagination around his chair? He set all his mind into his ears, straining for some other sound. There was none.
"This torture is called hope unfilled!" chirruped the nerve-devils. "Oh, what a dance we shall give you to-morrow after the operation! The operation is to-morrow, isn't it?"
Of course the nurse related the whole affair to Helen when she arrived.
"'Experiment,' he said. How extraordinary!" exclaimed the nurse, who was still more astounded when Helen gave an outcry of joy and, leaning over, puckered her lips and uttered a sharp whistle—which was one of her accomplishments—in Phil's ear.
Here was real test! No imagination about this, if he had heard. She drew back, quivering with suspense. Phil was wiggling his foot almost violently for his pad and pencil.
"Did somebody whistle in my ear?" he asked.
"I did! I did!" she repeated wildly, as she wrote her reply.
"They said it was imagination"—she knew who "they" were, those "Boches" of nerve-devils.
"Score one for the Allies!" she wrote on his arm. "I'm off to tell Mr. Ears!"
The Great Man came swinging along the gravel path, half running to keep up with Helen. After the scientific test which he promptly applied he felt as triumphant as a brigadier who had taken the first line trenches on a front of a thousand yards in the Ypres salient.