"Pity ole Farr's so bloomin' 'olesale," mused Alf, "because it wasn't 'arf a bad notion me bringing ole FitzPeter a bit of a present, but Farr always plasters it on so bloomin' thick.... But lumme, what's to prevent me?... That's a bit of an idea—never thought o' that. I'll do it."
He glanced cautiously up and down the road. Nobody was in sight. He climbed through the hedge at the roadside and found himself in a little, dark wood.
"Just the place," he said to himself. "Now for Eustace."
Unbuttoning his tightly fitting garments, he fished out the Button and rubbed it....
* * * * * * *
Meanwhile, on the lawn at Dunwater Park, strange events had been taking place. A large party was gathered together, but instead of the merry gabble of voices and laughter which characterized the tea-hour as a rule, a solemn silence brooded over the scene. A blight had fallen over the entire gathering. Light-hearted and empty-headed subalterns, whose whole duty in the scheme of things had till now been the outpouring of frothy nonsense, sat mum and miserable. Tea had not yet appeared.
Dominating the scene and acting as a sort of High Priestess of Blight, was a small, gray-haired woman, sitting bolt upright in a basket-chair, and gazing about in an acidulated manner. This was Lady Anderson. She had come over—as Isobel had foreseen—manifestly with the intention of drawing odious comparisons between her own hospital and Isobel's. She had brought with her two dispirited patients—a sapper major and an infantry captain—who were both sitting well on the outskirts of the group. Sir Edward FitzPeter, upon whom Lady Anderson always had an infuriating effect, had joined these two, in order, like them, to be as far away from her ladyship as possible.
A terrible silence fell, which was broken only by a whispered remark from one of the more irrepressible spirits that he was suffering from "septic melancholia."
It hardly seemed humanly possible that one person could, unaided, have reduced this usually lighthearted—not to say boisterous—gathering to such a pitch of gloom. Sister looked as if she might at any moment give up the unequal contest and burst into tears.
Isobel looked round her miserable party and sighed. She had spent a strenuous afternoon with the Wet Blanket, and was weary in body and mind. Lady Anderson had started by inspecting the ground floor arrangements of the Hospital, and had with diabolical ingenuity succeeded in finding or inventing some damning flaw in each; afterwards, it had been the pleasant duty of Isobel and Sister to exhibit the more intimate and important domestic machinery, and give their visitor an opportunity of expressing (under a very thin veil of acid politeness) her disapprobation of their methods here also.