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flight nurse,” he introduced her eagerly. “She flew me in from Hawaii.”
    The nurse smiled, and her face looked gay and impish.
    “Well, the pilot helped a little,” she said lightly. “He’s a very good patient, Mrs. Parker. He was almost no trouble at all!”
    Tip grinned, a small grin that was the very faintest possible memory of a smile that had once been audacious and gay and charming.
    “And from Jamie, that’s top praise, indeed! I feel as if I’d been decorated!” he said cheerfully.
    “I can’t thank you enough for looking after my son, Miss Jamison,” said Mrs. Parker winningly.
    Lieutenant Jamison looked at her quietly and said, “It’s my job, Mrs. Parker. There’s little any nurse can do. It’s always a privilege to do what we can!”
    She turned towards the door and Tip said, “Happy Landings, Jamie.”
    Over her shoulder she repeated that “Happy Landings, Lieutenant.”
    The door opened and closed behind her and Tip relaxed a little. Geraldine said gently, “Maybe we’d better go now, Mother Parker. We mustn’t tire him out.”
    Mrs. Parker said rebelliously, “But we’ve only just
got
here!”
    “But he’s been very sick and he’s got to get his strength back,” said Geraldine, smiling tenderly at him. “We don’t want to be thrown out on our very first visit — we want them to let us come again.”
    She bent above Tip and kissed his dry, hot lips. His hand closed about hers and held it very tightly, and he said very low, “Loving you always, darling.”
    “Always, darling,” she answered steadily.
    Behind her, Mrs. Parker waited, listening, tense, and relaxed a little.

Chapter Five
    It was a month before Tip was allowed to leave the hospital, and then it was only a temporary leave. He was permitted to go to the cottage in the hills for a month’s convalescence, during which he was to keep in touch with the hospital. At the end of that month, he would be given a physical examination and the doctors would decide whether any more could be done for him by their science, before permitting him to be discharged.
    He had gained weight in the first month and was not a living skeleton any longer. But it would be a long, long time before he would lose the look of one who has lived through hell.
    The change in him was not merely physical, as Geraldine was learning slowly, and almost with terror. He was a stranger; the old gay, audacious, happy-go-lucky Tip was gone. In his stead was a stranger, his hair streaked with gray, his lined white face that of a man who had aged fifteen years. His eyes had a dark, tortured look that sickened Geraldine when she tried to think of what had brought that look. He was gentle, courteous, polite — and aloof, almost impersonal. He accepted her own and his mother’s services with gratitude and an embarrassment that made him seem almost a stranger. He was agreeable to anything suggested; he seemed terribly anxious to please them, as though he had to win their liking. In short, Geraldine summed it up when he had been at the cottage a week. Tip was
humble!
And of all things on earth that Tip might have been, humility was the last she would have named!
    His gentleness and his way of sitting for hours gazing into space, not sleeping yet not entirely awake, disturbed her greatly.
    That first day, when they had arrived at the cottage and Mrs. Parker had thrown open the door to Geraldine’s bedroom and had urged that Tip get into bed and rest, he had paused in the doorway, looking uncertainly about him, and then a dark flush had risen to his thin face and he had turned to Geraldine.
    “This is your room?” he asked.
    Geraldine felt her own face flush but she smiled at him.
    “Where else would you expect us to put you, pal? I’m your wife — remember?”
    If her teeth set slightly on the last and if her eyes found it hard to meet that steady, curious regard in his, apparently only Mrs. Parker was aware of it.
    “I think I’d better have a hole of my