"Oh, I like this best, father. And it would have been ever so much more fun if Mr. De Vaux had been with us. Wouldn't it have been great to see him run, hear him puff, and say, 'Bless my soul'?"
"That will do, Constance. It wouldn't have been very great if one of us had got blown up by a shell."
"But, daddy, we had Dr. Sinclair with us. He would have fixed us up."
"Sublime faith! By Jove! doctor, you have an admirer here who will not go back on you."
Sinclair laughed, slipped his arm around the little maid as she pressed to his side, ran his fingers through the heavy, dark-brown curls, smiled into those frank child eyes which looked so straight into his, and passed on to the hospital to join Drs. Black and Bergmann.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Gorman, coming from the consulate towards the town, had stopped to ask Dr. MacKay if there was any service he could render.
"From the way the Frenchmen are shootin', I do not expect that we'll have manny cases in the hospital, barrin' it may be some of ourselves, if there's anny of us left to patch the rest together. So I moight as well be doin' an odd job for you, if there's annything that would be of service to you."
"Nothing that I know of just now, sergeant! Nothing! We have made all the preparations we could think of. We are in the hands of God. But your offer is itself a service. I thank you."
A shell drove into the ground in a plantation of young banian trees just to the west of the house. Its explosion threw up a miniature volcanic eruption of gravel.
"Bedad, Dr. MacKay, I have been safer in manny a battlefield than we are at this very minute."