“What Kitchener asked for.... Half a million or so.... We’ll need lots more before we’ve done with it.... Get me right again as quick as you can.... I’ll go crazy lying here.” “If you follow my instructions, and keep still, and don’t talk so much, I’ll get you right again. And when I do, just try and remember that you can’t stand as much as you could when you were five-and-twenty.” The Colonel grunted, since talking set the pain in his side stabbing again. Dr Rhenius wrote out a prescription, gave Miss Mitten very specific directions as to treatment, shook a warning finger at the obstreperous one, and promised to call back in the evening. “He’ll not be easy to manage,” he said to Miss Mitten, as he went downstairs. “Shall I send you in a nurse?” “Is it as bad as that?” asked Auntie Mitt, to whom an outside nurse suggested extremity. “If you think it necessary, Doctor, we must have one.” “No need to be alarmed--as yet. But I know him, and he’ll be a handful. And then there’s the night work, you see.” “If you think it necessary then.” But as he went down the path he met Mrs Dare coming up to enquire how things were. And when he told her, she said at once, “Nurse? We don’t need any outside nurse. We’ll manage him between us all right. Lois will be a great assistance.” “She’s home then? And Ray?” “They’ve all gone,--to the front, we suppose;--the first Territorials to go. They consider it a great honour. For myself ... it makes me sick to think of it all.” “Very well, then. The three of you ought to be able to manage him among you. We will leave it so.” “We’ll manage him all right. Tell us just what you want done and we’ll do it. It will be good for us all and keep our minds off other things.” No man could have had three more devoted and indefatigable nurses. They spared themselves nothing and put up with the safety-valve growlings of their patient like angels. The Colonel had had so little illness in his life--apart from wounds, which were quite a different matter--and felt so keenly his country’s need for him to be up and doing, that he took his shelving with anything but a good grace. Auntie Mitt and Lois alone would never have been able to manage him. But to Mrs Dare he submitted--a little grumpily, at times--but still submitted, and exploded all his objurgations on things in general under cover of the bed-clothes. He insisted on Lois reading all the latest news to him from the morning and evening papers, and forbade her to say a word in her letters to Ray about his illness. “No good worrying him,” he said. “He’ll have his hands full out there without having me on his mind.”