Montagu Falconer invariably adopted this method of announcing his readiness for breakfast. A commotion upon the ground floor merely signified to Philip the intelligence that it was about half-past nine, or half-past one, or eight in the evening.
"I am afraid I am keeping you," he said.
"Quite right," assented Peggy. "You are. Eat up your breakfast like a good little boy, and perhaps I will come and see you again later."
And she sped out of the room and down the stair, to quell a bread-riot. A woman with two men on her hands is, indeed, a busy person.
Philip munched his breakfast in utter content. He was convalescent now, though the first week or so had been a bad time. He was only intermittently conscious, and his injuries had combined to render sleep a nightmare and wakefulness a throbbing torment. But he would have gone through it all again, and yet again, cheerfully, provided he could have remained in the hands of his present nurse. In the dim and distant past he had recollections of another attendant,—a deft and capable lady in a blue-and-white uniform,—but she had disappeared long ago (friction with the master of the house being the cause), and his whole illness and recovery were summed up to Philip in the single word, Peggy.
For the Big Thing had happened. Philip was in love. His long-expected Lady had come to him at last—or rather, come back to him, after an interval of years—grown up into a slim, elfin, brown-eyed piece of Dresden china. She had gathered him up, crushed and broken, from the middle of a Surrey highway, and had conveyed him straight to her home in Chelsea, to be nursed and mothered back into coherent existence. This, be it noted, in the face of a strongly-worded and most enthusiastic eulogy (from her parent) of the public hospitals of the metropolis.
But Peggy had been quite firm.
"Dad," she said, "I don't think you quite realise that he has saved your life."
"If he has," said Montagu Falconer magnificently, "he shall be suitably rewarded."
Peggy eyed her progenitor dispassionately.