Just then Dorothy thought of something else and said it, and the conversation was diverted into other channels. Nearly always Evelyn had a book with her, which she read at odd moments, and quite always she had one book or more lying around the house, each open at the place at which she had last read, and each lying ready to her hand whenever a moment of leisure should come in her very busy day. For besides her attendance upon the sick, she relieved Dorothy of the greater part of her household duties, and was tireless in her work in the laboratory. Her knowledge of chemistry was scant, of course, but she had quickly and completely mastered the processes in use in the laboratory, and her skill in drug manufacture was greater than that of many persons more familiar with the technical part of that work. She had from the first taken exclusive care of her own room, peremptorily ordering all the maids to keep out of it. “A maid always reminds me,” she said to Dorothy, by way of offering an explanation that did not explain; for she did not complete her sentence. But so earnest was her objection that, even to the daily polishing of the white ash floor with a pine needle rubbing, she did everything within those precincts with her own hands. Dorothy let her have her way. It was Dorothy’s habit to let others do as they pleased so long as their pleasing was harmless. XVII A GUN-PIT CONFERENCE FOR full half an hour after Arthur Brent came out of the covered way and greeted his friend, Kilgariff’s bombardment and the enemy’s vigorous response continued. Arthur Brent stood by his friend in the midst of it all quite as if “the scream of shot, the burst of shell, and the bellowing of the mortars” had been nothing more than a harmless exhibition of “pyrotechny for our neighbour moon,” as Bailey phrases it in _Festus_.