"
"That is not where you mostly carry your handkerchief."
Peter was injured. He scowled ferociously at being doubted and
stood up before the wheeled chair to be searched. The ward
watched joyously, while from pocket after pocket of Peter's old
gray suit came Jimmy's salvage--two nuts, a packet of figs, a
postcard that represented a stout colonel of hussars on his back
on a frozen lake, with a private soldier waiting to go through
the various salutations due his rank before assisting him. A gala
day, indeed, if one could forget the grave in the little mountain
town with only a name on the cross at its head, and if one did
not notice that the boy was thinner than ever, that his hands
soon tired of playing and lay in his lap, that Nurse Elisabet,
who was much inured to death and lived her days with tragedy,
caught him to her almost fiercely as she lifted him back from the
chair into the smooth white bed.
He fell asleep with Peter's arm under his head and the horns of
the deer beside him. On the bedside stand stood the wooden
sentry, keeping guard. As Peter drew his arm away he became aware
of the Nurse Elisabet beckoning to him from a door at the end of
the ward Peter left the sentinel on guard and tiptoed down the
room. Just outside, round a corner, was the Dozent's laboratory,
and beyond the tiny closet where he slept, where on a stand was
the photograph of the lady he would marry when he had become a
professor and required no one's consent.
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