"Have a cigarette?" said Tom. "What outfit were you in?"
The prospect of free cigarettes and army talk, which already in less than three years had taken on a romantic glow, attracted the other men, who, as they finished their lunches, came up and joined the circle. Tom was holding forth in the centre; and when Bob Whitman glanced in on his way home he could see that Tom, by making his talk informal, was getting it across in great style.
Once, during the conversation, Providence seemed to offer an opportunity of bringing in his lecture in such a way that no one would guess he was giving it.
His conscience bothered him a little, and he plunged ahead. One of the men told how his bunkie at Base Six in Bordeaux had died of heart failure when under ether. In a somewhat parched voice Tom started to explain how this could come about, but in no time he was talking gibberish. "The aorta," he heard himself saying, "is the big main artery which comes out of one of the ventricles," and then he noticed the dazed look on the men's faces and, floundering hopelessly, managed to laugh it off. Well, he had tried to talk to them, anyway, and by consulting his watch he found that half an hour had gone by.
After his third cigarette—he had come plentifully supplied—he looked at his watch again. He could go at last! It was ten minutes to one, and Nancy had probably finished long ago. "Apparently this guy isn't coming today. I've got to run along. Well, I've enjoyed this talk a lot," and with an inclusive smile and wave of the hand he went.
Nancy wasn't back in the car, and starting off in the direction they had taken, he soon came to her room. There must have been a hundred women in it and it was Leofwin, not Nancy, who was talking to them.
Tom opened the door quietly and sat down on a stool in the rear. Nancy, pale and helpless, was sitting on one side of a resplendent circulatory system drawn to illustrate the subtleties of the designer's art.
"You will observe, ladies," Leofwin was saying in his purest Suffolk manner, "that shading is done with the crayon well back, like this." He made a few swift lines on the corner of the System and looked up with his bright, inquisitive smile. "Now are there any questions?" There was a stony silence, amid which the one o'clock whistle blew.
The foreman, left in charge by Bob, rose. "I'm sorry, Miss Whitman, but I'm afraid we'll have to stop today."
The worker's friend and sister bowed to him and, clutching her notes and her bag, with firmly set lips and eyes fixed, marched to the door. Leofwin followed, bowing pleasantly right and left, to the intense gratification of his audience, and the trio retired.