_ "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."
Deliberately, forcefully, the next words dropped from Carew's tongue. "The--devil--she--hasn't!"
"No."
Then Weldon waited for Carew to speak; but Carew merely sat and stared at his friend in speechless stupefaction.
"Oh, Lord!" he blurted out at last. "Then you haven't made it up?"
"There was nothing to make up," Weldon said drearily.
Again Carew's elbows came down on his knees with a bump.
"There was, too!" he contradicted, with an explosiveness which irresistibly reminded Weldon of their kindergarten days.
"What makes you think so?"
"I don't think. I know."
"How do you know?" Weldon asked listlessly.
"Alice Mellen told me," Carew replied conclusively.
"Told you what?"
"That Cooee Dent is in love with you."
From his superior knowledge, Weldon stared disdainfully up at him.
"Then there is one thing that Alice Mellen doesn't know."
"She does, then. She told me about it, when you went off on your feed, up at Lindley," Carew explained hurriedly. "I was worried about you, and she was worried about Miss Dent, and we compared notes. You hadn't said a word of any kind; we could only guess at things, so we wrote to each other about it. She told me then about Miss Dent's dashing up to Johannesburg after Vlaakfontein."
"She went to see her cousin."
"She also went to see you."
Carew's emphatic pause was broken by the coming of the nurse, who bent over the bed, raising her brows inquiringly, as she laid two fingers on Weldon's wrist. Carew took the obvious hint.
"I hope I've not stopped too long," he said, as he rose. "It has been good to see Mr. Weldon. May I come again?"
The nurse was a true woman. Therefore she smiled back into his happy, handsome face.
"I think you may," she answered. "Mr. Weldon is tired now, but you evidently have done him good."
Carew meditated aloud, as he went away down the walk.
"Out of every five women, three are cats," he observed tranquilly to himself. "I've cornered the fourth. It remains to be seen whether Weldon is cornered by the fifth, or only the third. Hasn't been to see him! Little beast! But I'll bet any amount of gold money that she has done endless messing for him on the sly."
Carew's words showed that it is usually not the man in love with a woman who is the shrewdest judge of the hidden recesses of that woman's nature. The fact was, Ethel had slaved unceasingly, but unseen, for the patient above stairs. See him she would not. Day after day, she invented fresh excuses to ward off her mother's suggestions of a call on the invalid; but also, day by day, she invented fresh delicacies to tempt the appetite dulled by months of army biscuit and bully beef. And, meanwhile, she was waiting.
Rather to her surprise, no message came down to her from the invalid's room. She had supposed as a matter of course that Weldon would intuitively recognize the source of the dainties which reached him anonymously. Man-fashion, however, he could see no reason that his beef tea and his wine jelly should be the work of different hands. He devoured them both, and reflected thankfully upon the skill of the Kaffir cook. Mr. Dent had been scrupulously literal in carrying out the commands laid upon him by his daughter. He had left in Weldon's mind no doubt whatsoever about the truth of his statement that Mrs. Dent alone had been responsible for the invalid's present quarters. Weldon had lavished thanks upon Mrs. Dent, and she had received them without demur, as her own lawful property. Even now, he was at a loss whether his recovery was more owing to Mrs. Dent or to the nurse. Each had given to him a large share of her vitality.
From a distance, he could follow Ethel's doings, could assure himself that his presence was no apparent check upon her happiness. Now it was the muffled whirr of the bell, followed by low voices from the room beneath. Now it was the roll of the carriage, bearing her away to dine or to dance, and leaving Weldon to lie and count the minutes until she returned. Now it was her light footstep on the stairs, or, but this was only at long intervals, her hushed voice in the hallway outside his door. At first, he used to lie and hold his breath, while he waited for her to open the door of his room. By degrees, however, he ceased to expect her. And, as the expectation died away, he chafed increasingly at the slowness of his recovery. Anything to get out of that house! She treated him as he would have scorned to treat an invalid dog who had taken refuge in his stable.
All this came slowly. For two endless weeks, Weldon lay unconscious. For two more endless weeks, he raved in delirium. Happily, his nurse was a discreet woman. She discouraged the visits of Mrs. Dent and her husband, offered the excuse that strange faces excited the invalid, and only admitted them during his brief intervals of sleep. Meanwhile, she used all her professional principles to keep herself from trying to solve the problem before her eyes. Upstairs was a man sick unto death, a man who raved ceaselessly of the daughter of the house. Downstairs, the daughter of the house was going her accustomed way, with never a question in regard to the man above. What had happened? How, if anything had happened, how did he chance to be in that home, with Mrs. Dent as his devoted and anxious slave? Resolutely, she fell to studying her temperature charts. Her specialty was fever, not heart disease.
A week after the tide had turned, Carew had been allowed to spend a short half-hour with the invalid. The next day, by advice of the nurse, Mr. Dent telephoned to him to come again. Something, whether in his personality or in his talk, had been of tonic power over Weldon. It seemed wise to repeat the experiment.
Carew came on the heels of his own voice through the telephone; and his face was smiling broadly, as he went leaping up the stairs. After all, it had not been in vain, his quixotic lingering in Cape Town for a weary month after receiving his discharge. Weldon and he had been good friends through thick and thin; it would have been beastly to leave him. And now, after all these useless weeks, he could at least do something to lighten the convalescence. Moreover, Carew's pocket held three letters, received that very noon; one of grudging approval from his son-sick mother, one of chaotic, but heartfelt thanks from Mrs. Weldon, and the third one an affirmative answer to a telegram he had sent to Alice Mellen, only the night before. He went into Weldon's room, looking, as he felt, the embodiment of happiness and health.
He hailed Weldon from the threshold. Tidings like his could wait during no interchange of mere conventional greetings. Weldon heard him to the end, congratulated him, demanded the repetition of all the details. Then, when Carew's excitement had quite spent itself, Weldon drew a letter from underneath his pillow.
"It came, this morning," he added laconically.
Carew seized the letter and ran his eye down the page. Then his face lighted.
"Nunc dimittis!" he said piously. "It's sure to be yours! Have you told Miss Dent?"
"I've not seen Miss Dent."
Carew's face fell.
"Not yet? But you will. And then you will tell her?"
Weldon's lips straightened into a thin line. He shook his head.
"But she ought to know."
"Why?"
"It is her right."
"Why?" Weldon asked again.
"Because--it is. It might make some difference in--"
Weldon stopped him abruptly.
"It could make no difference, Carew. In facing the main question, such things as that don't count. Even if they did, though," he rose on his elbow and faced his friend steadily; "even if they did, I would never consent to try to bribe a girl into loving me, by telling her I had won the V. C. It will be time enough for Miss Dent to hear of it, when it is given."
"But you will be in England then," Carew objected practically.
Weldon lay down again and drew the sheet upward till its shadow lay across his lips.
"What matter?" he answered slowly. "And, besides, Miss Dent isn't the girl to be won in any such way as that. Hers is a love to be given, not bought."
Half an hour later, Carew met Ethel on the stairs. As he halted to speak to her, he was shocked at the look in her face. The lips were smiling; but the eyes were the eyes of a hunted animal.
"So long since we have met!" he said, as he took her hand. "And so much has happened."
"Yes. I have been hoping to congratulate you," she answered.
"It was a stunning letter you wrote me," he said boyishly. "I suppose we are cousins now."
Then there came a little pause. Before either of them quite realized it, the pause had lengthened until it was hard to break.
"I have been up to see the invalid," he blurted out at last.
"How is he?" the girl inquired courteously.
"Better." Then a sudden note of resentment crept into Carew's honest voice. "He is counting the days now before he can be moved. He says your mother has been wonderfully good to him."
The girl stood aside to let Carew pass her by.
"She is good to everybody," she assented quietly. "I hope Mr. Weldon won't think of going away until he can be moved with perfect safety. It is really no trouble to have him here, and the nurse is very capable."
And Carew bowed in agreement. Once outside the door, however, he freed his mind, tersely and with vigor.
"Damn the nurse!" he said to the oak tree, as he passed it. _