’Oh, what rotten luck; how have you managed?’ ’Captain Everard did a lot for me.’ ’But not your hair, surely, Meg? (Get a porter, Brown, and fish the baggage out.)’ So while Brown ’fished,’ I revelled in my warm coat, and tried to see how it set on me at the back and said, ’Why, Ross, it’s sable.’ ’Well, you don’t think I’d give you a rabbit one, do you?’ said my brother. Being uneconomically inclined myself, I felt I ought to add, ’But what extravagance!’ He scoffed, and said he’d have me know his godmother had left all her money to him, and not to me, that a fur coat was cheaper than pneumonia, anyway, besides being less trouble to one’s relatives, and for those two reasons _only_ he had bought it. ’I’ve got a car waiting outside,’ he said, ’so that while remarks on finance, coming from you, are deeply interesting, my child, they are also apt to be expensive, as it’s up to thirty bob by now, the train’s so late.’ As we drove out of the station Ross said, ’Michael wired to the Savoyard for your rooms, and my hospital is quite close,’ and then he added in an airy manner, ’Oh, by the way, I knew you’d want a nursemaid for the Gidger, so I engaged one for you. She’s pretty and seems nice, so I didn’t bother about references.’ I didn’t want to appear ungrateful, so I only murmured that I could see about those later on, and I drew a little closer to him and squeezed his arm for joy at seeing him again, while the Gidger gazed, entranced, out of the window at the traffic. ’Ross,’ I said, ’how on earth does Sam always manage it?’ ’I dunno,’ said Ross, staring through the glass at Sam’s impassive back. ’It’s extraordinary. When I got this bullet in my arm he came up a moment after, said he’d bust his knee. Sometimes I think he must have some arrangement with the d——’ ’With a person that we need not name.’ ’Just so,’ said Ross, and giggled as he used to do when I reproved him. But, all the same, it is a funny thing that Sam always has managed to get with Ross, from the time he turned up as the school boot-boy, to the day he appeared in my brother’s dug-out with a can and said, ’Hot water, sir,’ in just the same old way. When I arrived at the hotel the ’pretty nursemaid’ turned out to be my darling Nannie. ’When you feel you can stop kissing them both, Meg would like your references.’ ’References given _and_ required,’ laughed Nannie. ’Then the deal’s off. Meg’s past won’t bear looking into.’ Ross had just crammed my rooms with flowers and the air was full of scent. He said Michael told him ’heaps of lilies.’ Did he remember that the scent of those is love? I do think, however, he might have ordered the removal of the earwigs. I was so tired that I came upstairs directly after dinner. The Gidger was already fast asleep. ’Pretty lamb,’ said Nannie, just as she always used to do. So like the gardener’s cat in Punch, I felt that we could ’Sit among the greenhouse flowers And sleep for hours and hours and hours.’