“Wait a moment,” he said. “Do you think you are really useful at that V.A.D. place?”
“I try to be,” she answered. “None of us can do very much in cases of great suffering, but every little helps.”
“Delightful platitudes!” and the Philosopher gave another snort. “Personally, I think you are much more useful at home. Your father is not very well this afternoon and has been asking for you. I left him on the sofa in the library. He seems very irritable. I’m going for a walk.”
He strolled off, pausing a moment or two to light his pipe, and she hurried to the library where she found her father on the sofa as the Philosopher had said, in a state of highly nervous irritation brought on by the gout.
“Where have you been?” he wailed, as he saw her. “Down at that d—d hospital again? God bless my soul, what sort of a daughter are you to neglect your poor old father for those miserable Tommies! All ne’er-do-wells I’ll swear!—they would have been ‘on the road’ picking and stealing and up to all sorts of mischief if they hadn’t gone into the Army! And now you must dance attendance on them as if they were your own flesh and blood—” Here he broke off with a sharp cry, wrung from him by a twinge in his gouty toe.
“Poor Dad, I didn’t know you weren’t feeling well,” she said, tenderly. “If I had I wouldn’t have gone—you know I wouldn’t! But there’s nothing to be done for the gout, dear, is there?—you must rest—and have the medicine the doctor ordered—”
“I don’t know where it is,” he growled. “The bottle has been carefully put where it can’t be found!”
She smiled, with a gently breathed, “Oh, no, it hasn’t!” and opening a cupboard by the fireplace, produced the desired palliative. He watched her pour the measured dose into a wine-glass, and took it with a puckered face like a naughty child.
“Horrid stuff!” he said, peevishly. “How do your Tommies take their medicine?”
She laughed.