She slipped out of the room. In a few minutes she came back, bearing a tray, upon which was a cup of chocolate with a little mound of whipped cream on top, and beside it a plate of sandwiches. She set her tray at Peter's elbow.
"Father is so fond of this, late in the evening, that Cook keeps a double boiler ready on the back of the range, and the rest of us make use of it," she explained. "You may not be hungry, but it will be good for you. Tell me, did you have your supper?"
"No, I haven't been home," he owned. "If a fellow could eat at all, he ought to be able to eat this."
To Shirley's satisfaction Peter consumed every one of the six thin sandwiches, and when she suggested a second cup of chocolate, he gratefully accepted it. He had been famishing, though he had not known it. The interview with the specialist had taken place before lunch time, and Peter had not remembered lunch at all.
Being human, and very weary, creature comforts did their part in strengthening him, in mind as well as body. When he had finished, and had spent another half-hour listening to Shirley's account of news from Forrest, who was in the West Indies now, he rose, a very different young man from the one who had come in out of the rain an hour before.
When he had exchanged the velvet house-coat for the rough tweed one, now dried by the fire, he stood before her, hat in hand. He looked down into her friendly uplifted face and something very appreciative showed in his own. He could summon only the suggestion of a smile, but his eyes were less heavy, his colour had come back, and resolution was once more in his bearing.
"You would put heart into a craven," he said, shaking hands.
"You 're no craven," answered Shirley, returning the look steadily with her frank eyes, "but one of the stoutest-hearted I ever knew. I know lots more about you than you think, and I know what you have been facing all these years in the way of sticking to work you did n't like."
"That's nothing. Everybody does that, if he amounts to any thing."
"Everybody doesn't. But it's made you strong and brave. You 're brave now--and you 're going to be braver yet."