“I don’t know,” said the nurse. “I don’t see why this leg should make much difference. It was only one bone, you know, and you could bandage that leg if it felt weak. But you can’t keep falling off cots and sticking infected pins into you.”
“Funny thing about that cot,” said Zaidos. “The bolt that held the spring and headboard together was gone—completely gone. I wonder if it ever was in. Perhaps when they put it together, they forgot that corner, and it stuck together until I happened to sit down on it just right. I’ve known things like that. I’m glad it didn’t go down with some poor fellow who was badly wounded. It gave my leg an awful jolt. And it certainly gets me where I got that pin in the crutch pad. It must have been in the lining, and just worked out. I don’t believe it will make a bad sore. My blood is pretty good. It’s funny, though.”
“A lot of queer things happen to you, Zaidos,” said the nurse. “Tell me, have you no other name? Are you just Zaidos and nothing else?”
“Oh, yes, I have five or six other names,” said Zaidos, smiling. “But you know in Greece it is the custom to call the—”
He glanced into the face before him with a queer embarrassed look, and stopped.
“Just so,” said the nurse. “I understand. You are the head of your house, whatever that is, and you have very sensibly decided to keep it all to yourself while you are mixed up in this war. Well, Zaidos, in England, too, we sometimes call the head of a noble house by his family name. For my part, however, I prefer to think of you simply as a particularly nice, agreeable boy, who has made his illness a very pleasant time for the people who have been near him; and so I think I will call you something simpler than Zaidos. Is John one of your five or six names?”
“Nothing so easy as that,” said Zaidos, smiling. “Why, I will tell you what they are.”
“I don’t want to know,” said the nurse. “I, too, have a name that we will forget for the time, but you may call me Nurse Helen. And I have the dearest father in the world whose name is John; so I will call you John. Do you mind?”
“I should say not!” said Zaidos.
“You see, John,” said Nurse Helen, “every time I say that name I feel closer to my home and all the dear ones there. Some day I will tell you about them all.”