The patients in the ward were mostly working-men in the springtime of their strength, the majority of them victims of the late quarry accident. A few, like poor Jack, had been struck down by mishap at sea or in the harbour. Beside nearly every bed was a visitor. Here might be seen a country girl talking in whispers to her sweetheart. Here a pale wife clasped her husband’s hand, or a mother in silent anguish watched her lad’s changed face. On every pillow was a little posy of sweet-smelling cottage flowers, reminding the gaunt sufferers who lay there, patient and uncomplaining, of blue summer sky, of the freshness of fields and gardens, of home. Number 28 had neither visitor nor posy. Poor Jack came from a remote hamlet among the Devonshire moors. His mates on board the _Princess_ were afloat again. The lad had no friends, save the surgeons and nurses of the Guernsey hospital--and Geff Arbuthnot. ‘Speak to him about his own country,’ Geoffrey whispered, as his companion drew back a little; ‘Jack will dispense with any formal introduction.’ And on this, Dinah, her face overflowing with sweetest womanly compassion, stooped over the low pallet and spoke--a commonplace word or two, unworthy of raising to the dignity of print--a word or two whose homely Devonshire lilt called the blood up to Jack’s temples as though some voice from the old familiar home addressed him. Since her marriage, Dinah had learnt to speak English, ‘with a foreign pronunciation,’ Gaston would tell her, ‘yet scarcely strong enough to be disagreeable.’ Although a tell-tale cadence was traceable, ever and again, in her speech, she had tardily succeeded in putting away the Devonshire burr that was strong on her tongue when Geoffrey met her first. Here, at Jack’s bedside, no Gaston near to be put to shame, she fell back, instinctively, upon the West Country accent, the soft, half-strange, half-familiar o’s and u’s of her childhood. ‘It’s so bad to be sick, for a young fellow like you, and away from home. We just thought you might like a talk with some one Devonshire born and bred. I wonder, now, do you and I come from the same part?’ ‘I was born at Torrhill, a village out away beyond Chagford. A poor place, ma’am, on the borders of the moor--quite a poor place,’ repeated Jack apologetically. ‘Why, that is near to my own town, Tavistock!’ said Dinah. ‘We used to pass Torrhill going along the Vale of Widdicombe every autumn when we went out whortleberrying. “Torrhill, in the cold country.” I mind we children used to say, when we got snowstorms in winter, “the Widdicombe folk were picking their geese.”’