"Good morning, Captain Birnie. I hope you slept well."
"Thank you, I did," replied Roy. "Are you the Sister?"
Across the passage came a voice:
"Let me present you, sir, to Little Lily, our Cross Red nurse! She—"
The lady indicated whirled round upon the offender, whose grinning face, partially obscured by a patch over one eye, could be discerned upon the pillow of the bed in the room opposite.
"Mr. Abercrombie," she announced, "if you can't behave I shall report you to the Matron."
Mr. Abercrombie was all contrition at once.
"All right, Nurse!" he announced. "I apologise! I only want to warn you, sir," he added to Roy, "that she's married! But she never tells us that until it's too late! Do be careful!"
Little Lily, the Cross Red nurse—otherwise the Lady Hermione Mulready—turned an unruffled countenance to Roy. It was true that she was married; she possessed what Mr. Abercrombie would have called "a perfectly good husband of her own" in the Irish Guards. She had once possessed two brothers also, somewhat akin in appearance and disposition to the effervescent Abercrombie. Perhaps that was why she suffered his impertinences so readily.
"Here is your breakfast, Captain Birnie," she continued. "The Matron says you can't have bacon yet; but if you are good you may reach an ordinary diet next week."