Quin

								

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.