"Certainly you are. Open again!"
He obeyed meekly. "I should like to see Bab," he said, when the spoon was once more removed.
"So you shall, when you have drunk up all your gruel," promised the Duchess.
The Colonel thought it over, and then said in a firmer tone: "I'll be shaved first."
"My dear fellow, why worry?" Worth said.
"By all means let him be shaved," said the Duchess, frowning at him. "He will feel very much more the thing."
When Barbara came in with her grandfather to be met by the news that Colonel Audley was in the valet's hands, being shaved, she exclaimed: "Shaved! Good God, how came you to let him disturb himself for such a foolish thing?"
"My love, when a man begins to think of shaving you may take it from me that he is on the road to recovery," said the Duchess. She took her husband's hands, and squeezed them. "Bab has told you, hasn't she, Avon? My dear, we must be very proud of our boys, and try not to grieve."
He put his arm round her, saying: "Poor Mary! Depend upon it, we shall soon get news of that scamp George being safe and sound. I have been to Stuart's and learned from him that the Duke is in the town. Our losses have been enormous, by all accounts, but just think of Bonaparte completely overset! By God, it makes up for all!"
The arrival just then of the surgeon put an end to any further conversation. The Duchess and Worth accompanied him upstairs to the Colonel's room. He admitted that he had not expected to find his patient in such good shape, but pulled a long face over the leg wound, which, from having been so roughly bound upon the battlefield, and chafed by continued exertion, was in a bad state. He took Worth aside, and warned him that he should prepare the Colonel's mind for amputation.