Melville himself had been to tea on the balcony since then, and it is safe to say that at no time had Dick been so near pride as when the great man, rather shy and tongue-tied at first in the presence of Mrs. Lester, had sat on his couch and talked to him, a scrubby junior, as an equal!
"You've got to look sharp and well, you know, Lester," he had said, at parting. "We want all our men badly; the Wesley and Scotch juniors are going to take a heap of beating next term!" Which had left Dick speechless, yet glowing. He astonished the nurse that evening by demanding two eggs for tea!
Neil Fraser had brought his mother this afternoon--a sweet-faced old lady, who sat beaming alternately on her tall son, and on the "case" that had already made his name a household word among surgeons. And John Lester leaned against the balcony rail, smoking, and looking contentedly at his son.
Dick's feet were very uncertain still. He had discarded crutches after a few days' use, declaring that they hurt him more than they helped him. Then he had hobbled, with a stick or between two helpers; only the day before had he suddenly declared that he would walk alone--and had walked! A few steps, at first, from his couch to his mother; subsiding on her, flushed and laughing, while she caught him to her and held him, as she had done when, twelve years before, his baby feet had first carried him to her across the nursery floor. She remembered yet the pride of that long ago day. It was a small thing beside the utter thankfulness of this.
The hospital was keenly interested in Dick's convalescence. It was not often that they had a patient so doggedly determined to get well. He demanded instructions as to working his muscles, and struggled with them as soon as he was permitted, rubbing himself, moving limbs that no longer seemed to belong to him, and performing the limited amount of "physical jerks" possible to one who lies flat in bed. The scope of his energies widened as he was allowed to sit up; he learned from Neil Fraser and from the masseur who visited him daily how to second their efforts, and the nurses found him, at regular intervals, exercising solemnly, grimacing with pain at the creaking of his unused muscles, and working the harder the more he grimaced. The pretty girl in room five, who had just lost her appendix, and the stout old gentleman in three, very bad-tempered with the gout, used to ask their nurses each morning how many inches young Lester had moved since breakfast, and send him messages of congratulation; the matron, tall and beautiful in snowy white, would stand at the end of his bed, cheering him on, with an eye wary for signs of fatigue. And when he sat up--and when he first hobbled on his crutches--the word ran from room to room, and the nurses left their work to peep in at him and applaud. Even the bad-tempered old gentleman, who was wont to drive his nurse almost to tears if a stray sound penetrated his room, was found only smiling on the morning that Dick, forgetting his surroundings in the triumph of his first steps, sat on the end of his bed and woke the echoes with a shout of "Buck up, School!"