Percy was silent for a moment, then he stretched out his hand entreatingly:
“Perhaps you could help me, Stellan? Hasn’t the Army some connection with the Red Cross? Oh, if you could find me in some way a more bearable face!”
Stellan suddenly had an idea, a strange half-impossible idea which, however, at bottom seemed to him to be curiously charged with infinite possibilities. “Hedvig!” he thought. “Hedvig!” He had to make an effort to recover his normal, smooth and kindly tone.
“I could speak to my sister Hedvig,” he said. “She is a nurse. But I tell you beforehand that she has a sombre and strange temper. But her face is really something for an artist to look upon.”
Percy became quite excited and was filled with touching gratitude:
“A face, a temperament, a human being! Oh, how grateful I should be to you!”
“Good, I’ll speak to her if she can get free. Anyhow this grinning monster must be got rid of!”
With this Stellan took a warm good-bye. But at the door he turned round with his most charming and unconcerned expression.
“By the way, Percy, I am going about with a damned little bill in my hip pocket. You would not like by any chance to put your scrawl across it?”
“With pleasure, old boy, with pleasure.”