Three days passed--three days in which Peter thought little and felt much. He had been passed about among the staff of doctors very much like a delectable dish, and sampled by all. Half a dozen had taken him in hand. He had been apportioned a treatment, a diet, a bath hour, and a nurse. Looking back on those three days--and looking forward to a continuous protraction of the same--he could see less reason than ever for coaxing an existence out of life. Life meant to him work--efficient, telling work--and companionship--sharing with a congenial soul recreation, opinions, and meals--and some day, love. Well--what of these was left him? It was then that he remembered the gray girl's advice in the omnibus and went out to find Hennessy and the swans.
His nurse was at supper, so he was mercifully free; moreover it was the emptiest time of day for out-of-doors. A few straggling patients were knocking prescribed golf-balls about the links, and a scattering of nurses were hurrying in with their wheel-chairs. Half-way between the links and the last building was the pond, shaded by pines and flanked by a miniature rustic rest-house, and thither Peter went. On a willow stump emerging from the pond he found Hennessy, as wrinkled as a butternut, with a thatch of gray hair, a mouth shirred into a small, open ellipse, and eyes full of irrepressible twinkles. He was seated tailor fashion on the stump, a tin platter of bread across his knees and the swans circling about him. He looked every whit as Irish as his name, and he was scolding and blarneying the birds by turn.
"Go-wan, there, ye feathered heathen! Can't ye be lettin' them that has good manners get a morsel once in a while? Faith, ye'll be havin' old Doc Willum afther ye with his stomach cure if ye don't watch out." He looked over his shoulder and caught Peter's gaze. "Sure, birds or humans, they all have to be coaxed or scolded into keepin' healthy, I'm thinkin', and Hennessy's head nurse to the swans," he ended, with a chuckle.
But there was something quite different on Peter's mind. "Has one of the patients--a young person in gray--been here lately? I mean have you seen her about any time?"
Hennessy shook a puzzled head. "A young gray patient, ye say? Sure there might be a hundred--that's not over-distinguishin'. I leave it to ye, sir, just a gray patient is not over-distinguishin'."