thinks of as he lies there by the window.
He doesn't confide it to his hospital nurse.'

'Yes, he would treat her courteously, just in that military style,' said
Grace, realising the hospital attendance.

'It 's the style I like best:--no perpetual personal thankings and
allusions to the trouble he gives!' Jane exclaimed. 'He shows perfect
good sense, and I like that in all things, as you know. A red-haired
young woman chooses to wait on him and bring him flowers--he's brother
to Patrick in his love of wild flowers, at all events!--and he takes it
naturally and simply. These officers bear illness well. I suppose it 's
the drill.'

'Still I think it a horrid profession, dear.'

Grace felt obliged to insist on that: and her 'I think,' though it was
not stressed, tickled Jane's dormant ear to some drowsy wakefulness.

'I think too much honour is paid to it, certainly. But soldiers, of all
men, one would expect to be overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness. He has
never complained; not once. I doubt if he would have complained if Mrs.
Adister had been waiting on him all the while, or not a soul. I can
imagine him lying on the battle-field night after night quietly,
resolving not to groan.'

'Too great a power of self-repression sometimes argues the want of any
emotional nature,' said Grace.

Jane shook her head. She knew a story of him contradicting that.

The story had not recurred to her since she had undertaken her service.
It coloured the remainder of an evening walk home through the beechwoods
and over the common with Grace, and her walk across the same tracks
early in the morning, after Grace had gone to London. Miss Colesworth
was coming to her next week, with her brother if he had arrived in
England. Jane remembered having once been curious about this adventurous
man of Letters who lived by the work of his pen. She remembered
comparing him to one who was compelled to swim perpetually without a
ship to give him rest or land in view. He had made a little money by a
book, and was expending it on travels--rather imprudently, she fancied
Emma Colesworth to be thinking. He talked well, but for the present she
was happier in her prospect of nearly a week of loneliness. The day was
one of sunshine, windless, odorous: one of the rare placid days of April
when the pettish month assumes a matronly air of summer and wears it
till the end of the day. The beech twigs were strongly embrowned, the
larches shot up green spire