Quin | Page 9

ordering more of this fool rest business? Well, he told
himself fiercely, he wasn't going to stand for it! The war was over, he
had done his part, he was going to demand his freedom. Discipline or
no discipline, he would go over Phipps' head and appeal to the Colonel.
Throwing aside the ice-bag, he looked around for his uniform. But the
nurse had evidently mistrusted the look in his eyes when she gave him
the Captain's orders, for the hook over his bed was empty. He raised
himself in his cot and glared savagely down the ward, sniffing the air
suspiciously. Two orderlies were wheeling No. 17 back from the
operating-room, and Quin already caught the faint odor of ether. The
first whiff of it filled him with loathing.
Thrusting his bare feet into slippers and his arms into a shabby old
bath-robe, he flung himself out of bed and slipped out on the porch.
The air was cold and bracing and gloriously free from the hospital

combination of wienerwürst, ether, and dried peaches that had come to
be a nightmare odor to him. He sat on the railing and drew in deep,
refreshing breaths, and as he did so things began to right themselves.
Fair play to Quin amounted almost to a religion, and it was suddenly
borne in upon him that he would not be where he was had he observed
the rules of the game. But then again, if he had not danced, he never
would have----
At that moment something so strange happened that he put a hot hand
to a hotter brow and wondered if he was delirious. The singularly
vibrant voice that had been echoing in his memory since New Year's
eve was saying directly behind him:
"I shall give them all the chocolate they want, Captain Harold Phipps,
and you may court-martial me later if you like!"
Quin glanced up hastily, and there, framed in the doorway, in a Red
Cross uniform, stood his dream girl, looking so much more ravishing
than she had before that he promptly snatched the blue and gray vision
from its place of honor and installed a red, white, and blue one instead.
So engrossed was he in the apparition that he quite failed to see Captain
Phipps surveying him over her shoulder.
"Number 7!" said the Captain with icy decision, "weren't you instructed
to stay in bed?"
"I was, sir," said Quin, coming to attention and presenting a decidedly
sorry aspect.
"Go back at once, and add three days to the time indicated. This way,
Miss Bartlett."
Now, it is well-nigh impossible to preserve one's dignity when
suffering a reprimand in public; but when you are handicapped by a
shabby bath-robe, a three days' growth of beard, and a grouch that gives
you the expression of a bandit, and the public happens to be the one
being on earth whom you are most anxious to please, the situation
becomes tragic.

Quin set his jaw and shuffled ignominiously off to bed, thankful for
once that he had been considered unworthy a second glance from those
luminous brown eyes. His satisfaction, however, was short-lived. A
moment later the young lady appeared at the far end of the ward,
carrying an absurd little basket adorned with a large pink bow, from
which she began to distribute chocolates.
A feminine presence in the ward always created a flutter, but the
previous flutters were mere zephyrs compassed to the cyclone produced
by the new ward visitor. Some one started the phonograph, and
Michaelis, who had been swearing all day that he would never be able
to walk again, actually began to dance. Witticisms were exchanged
from bed to bed, and the man who was going to be operated on next
morning flung a pillow at an orderly and upset a vase of flowers.
Things had not been so cheerful for weeks.
Quin, lying in the last bed in the ward, alternated between rapture and
despair as he watched the progress of the visitor. Would she recognize
him? Would she speak to him if she did, when he looked like that?
Perhaps if he turned his face to the wall and pretended to be asleep she
would pass him by. But he did not want her to pass him by. This might
be the only chance he would ever have to see her again!
Back in his fringe of consciousness he was frantically groping for the
name the Captain had mentioned: Barnet? Barret? Bartlett? That was it!
And with the recovery of the name Quin's mind did another somersault.
Bartlett? Where had he heard that name? Eleanor Bartlett? Some
nonsense about "Solomon's baby." Why, Rose Martel, of course.
Then all thought deserted him, for the world suddenly shrank to five
feet two of femininity,