On the Firing Line Part 36

She ignored the mockery of his tone.

"Yes, please," she a.s.sented quietly. "It will only take you a minute."

It took him ten. When he came back into the room, his hat was in his hand.

"I think I will go over to the Grand for a minute," he explained. "I don't quite like what I hear."

"What did you hear?"

In the dim upper hallway, a girlish figure leaned far over the railing and strained her ears for the reply. Then, noiselessly, the door of her room shut again behind her.

"They tell me," Mr. Dent was saying; "that Weldon is there, unconscious in his room. The boy brought him into the house in his arms, and they have sent for Dr. Wright. It is a bad case of enteric, mixed with some trouble with the brain. He appears to be suffering from nervous shock, they say, increased by a long strain of anxiety."

Half an hour later, he was called from Weldon's room to speak to his wife at the telephone.

"Yes," he answered her. "It is as bad as I heard, as bad as it can be. You think so? Are you strong enough? Sure? Hold the wire, then, till I ask the doctor." The interval was short; and he went on again, "The doctor says he can be moved now, but not later. It may be a matter of weeks. How soon can you be ready? Very well. Will you be sure to save yourself all you can? In an hour, then. And the doctor will have a nurse waiting there? And can you put the boy into some corner? He would be frantic, if we tried to leave him behind.

Very well. Yes." And the telephone rang off.

It was midnight before the Dent household was fully reconstructed.

Upstairs in the great eastern front room, a white-capped nurse was bending above the unconscious man in the bed; downstairs in the kitchen, the tears of Kruger Bobs were mingling with the cold roast beef on the table before him. The doctor had just gone away, and in the room underneath the sickroom, Mr. Dent and his wife were quietly laying plans to meet the needs of the changed routine which had fallen upon their home. He looked up, as Ethel came slowly into the room.

"By the way, Ethel, I forgot to ask you before; but did you find your pin?"

She looked at him wonderingly. Her face was pale and drawn; but her eyes were shining like the gems she had professed to miss.

"What pin do you mean?" she asked blankly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

"Don't wait any longer, Carew. Really, it's not worth while."

"Too late for us to part company now," Carew answered serenely.

"I know. You've stood by me like a good fellow; but it will be some time yet before I can sail. And you know you are in a hurry to get away."

"Don't be too sure of that," Carew advised him. "All my good things aren't at one end of the world."

Weldon's lips curled into the ghost of his old smile.

"Then take one of them along with you," he suggested.

Elbows on knees and chin on fists joined knuckle to knuckle, Carew turned and smiled blandly down at the face on the pillow.

"Weldon, for a man who has been off his head for a month, you do have singularly wise ideas. But do you suppose she'd go?"

"Which?"

"Miss Mellen, of course. It's a question of ages. Young Mahomet is easier to move than the everlasting hills."

"Meaning your mother? She would thank you." "She will thank me, when she sees Alice," Carew responded hopefully. "But, honor bright, do you suppose Miss Mellen would go back with me?"

"I thought she promised."

"Yes, but now," Carew persisted, with the eagerness of a boy. "Right off, next month."

"There's only one way to tell; ask her," Weldon answered. "If she is the girl I think she is, she will say yes."

"You do like her; don't you, Weldon?" The eagerness was still in his tone.

"Intensely," Weldon replied quietly. "I have seen few women I have liked as well."

"What larks we'll be having, this time next year, talking it all over together," Carew said, in a sudden, thoughtful burst of prophecy. "By the time we get home, we shall forget the blood and the dog-biscuit, and only remember the skittles and beer. If only--"

"What?" Weldon looked up at him without flinching.

Carew did flinch, however.

"Nothing," he said hastily. "One is never quite content, you know."

Weldon drew a deep, slow breath.

"No," he echoed. "One is never quite content."

Carew crossed his legs, as he settled back in his chair.

"Mayhap. Some of us ought to be, though."

"Yes. You're a lucky fellow, Carew."

"So are you. The trouble is, one never knows when he is well off."

"But we all know when we aren't," Weldon replied succinctly.

Carew's glance was expressive, as it roved about the luxurious room, with the bed drawn up near the window which looked out, between the branches of an ancient oak tree, on the blue waters of Table Bay and on the fringe of shipping by the Docks far to the eastward. Faintly from the room below came the sound of a piano and of a hushed girlish voice singing softly to itself.

"It all depends on one's point of view," Carew said, after an interval. "I am living in a seven-by-nine room in a hotel, and Miss Mellen is seventy-two miles and three quarters away. Weldon, you are a lucky dog, if you did but know it."

Weldon shut his teeth for a moment. Then he said quietly,--

"Carew, it is five weeks that I have been in this house. Mr. Dent and dear little Mother Dent have been angel-good to me. Miss Dent--"

He hesitated.

"Has been an archangel?" Carew supplemented calmly.

"Has never once come into my sight."