Peter nodded.
The nurse turned to go, hesitated, and then came back to the cot. Peter thought he had never seen her eyes so full of wonder.
“Man o’ mine, maybe you won’t want me when you know I almost let you go, that I intended to let you die to save first a French lad that came in with you.”
Peter grinned. “Same old Leerie! Well, we’re quits, sweetheart, and I’m glad to have it off my conscience. Sort of did the same thing myself. Rushed off in the shelling to bring in that same poor chap—he’d got a bullet in his leg—and all the time I knew I ought to be thinking of you first and hanging on to safety. Funny, isn’t it, how something queer gets you in the midst of it all and you do the last thing in the world you want to do? A year or two and the whole thing will be unexplainable.”
Sheila bent over and laid her lips to Peter’s. She knew that in a year—in a century—they would still understand why they had done these things, and she was glad they had both paid their utmost for the love and happiness that she knew was theirs now for all time.
Peter broke on her reverie with a chuckle. “Remember old Hennessy saying once that he believed you would give me away with everything else—if you thought anybody else needed me more? He’d certainly wash his hands of the pair of us.”
“Hennessy’s an old dear. I’ll get the chaplain, and afterward let’s send Hennessy the first—and the best—cable he’s ever had. Sort of owe it to him, don’t we?”
Without any of the original splendor of decorations, collation, and attire, with no one but the chaplain to marry them and the chief to bless them, Sheila O’Leary came into her own at last. As for Peter—he looked as Hennessy described him on the day the Brookses came home—“wi’ one eye on the thruest lass God ever made an’ the other on Paradise.”