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For fifty-five minutes Jane sat in that chair breakfastless, very casually washed and with the aforesaid Billie Burkeness of hair. Then, hunger gaining over temper, she opened the door and peered out. From somewhere near at hand there came a pungent odor of burning toast. Jane sniffed; then, driven by hunger, she made a short sally down the hall to the parlour where the nurses on duty made their headquarters. It was empty. The dismantled bell register was on the wall, with the bell unscrewed and lying on the mantel beside it, and the odour of burning toast was stronger than ever.

Jane padded softly to the odour, following her small nose. It led her to the pantry, where under ordinary circumstances the patients’ trays were prepared by a pantrymaid, the food being shipped there from the kitchen on a lift. Clearly the circumstances were not ordinary. The pantrymaid was not in sight.

Instead, the red-haired person was standing by the window scraping busily at a blackened piece of toast. There was a rank odour of boiling tea in the air.

“Damnation!” said the red-haired person, and flung the toast into a corner where there already lay a small heap of charred breakfast hopes. Then he saw Jane.

“I fixed the bell, didn’t I?” he remarked. “I say, since you claim to know so much about cooking, I wish you’d make some toast.”

“I didn’t say I knew much,” snapped Jane, holding her kimono round her. “I said I knew more than you knew about politeness.”

The red-haired person smiled again, and then, making a deep bow, with a knife in one hand and a toaster in the other, he said: “Madam, I prithee forgive me for my untoward conduct of an hour since. Say but the word and I replace the bell.”

“I won’t make any toast,” said Jane, looking at the bread with famished eyes.

“Oh, very well,” said the red-haired person with a sigh. “On your head be it!”

“But I’ll tell you how to do it,” conceded Jane, “if you’ll explain who you are and what you are doing in that costume and where the nurses are.”

The red-haired person sat down on the edge of the table and looked at her.

“I’ll make a bargain with you,” he said. “There’s a convalescent typhoid in a room near yours who swears he’ll go down to the village for something to eat in his–er–hospital attire unless he’s fed soon. He’s dangerous, empty. He’s reached the cannibalistic stage. If he should see you in that ravishing pink thing, I–I wouldn’t answer for the consequences. I’ll tell you everything if you’ll make him six large slices of toast and boil him four or five eggs, enough to hold him for a while. The tea’s probably ready; it’s been boiling for an hour.”

Hunger was making Jane human. She gathered up the tail of her kimono, and stepping daintily into the pantry proceeded to spread herself a slice of bread and butter.

“Where is everybody?” she asked, licking some butter off her thumb with a small pink tongue.

Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And the bosun tight and the midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain’s gig.

recited the red-haired person.

“You!” said Jane with the bread halfway to her mouth.

“Even I,” said the red-haired person. “I’m the superintendent, the staff, the training school, the cooks, the furnace man and the ambulance driver.”

Jane was pouring herself a cup of tea, and she put in milk and sugar and took a sip or two before she would give him the satisfaction of asking him what he meant. Anyhow, probably she had already guessed. Jane was no fool.

“I hope you’re getting the salary list,” she said, sitting on the pantry girl’s chair and, what with the tea inside and somebody to quarrel with, feeling more like herself. “My father’s one of the directors, and somebody gets it.”