Stephen turned restlessly on his pillows, and Angela Latham bent down and cozied them deftly.

“You’re a wonderful nurse,” he told her gratefully.

“Not bad, am I?”

“I’ve made you a great deal of trouble.”

“You have,” Mrs. Latham returned cordially. “But you know what Mrs. Hemans says, or perhaps it’s Mark Twain, I always get them mixed, ‘the labor we delight in physics pain’—I’ve quite enjoyed the trouble—and Georgie Washington, but you begin to do me credit. You’re going to be a good boy now and do just as I say.”

“Am I?” Pryde said skeptically.

Angela held out her ring-heavy hand. “Put it there, pard,” she commanded. And after a moment the sick man lifted his thin, bloodless hand and laid it in hers. “Perhaps I’m going to be good—though it hadn’t occurred to me till you mentioned it—but I can scarcely be required to be a boy. I was quite a year or two old at your birth.”

“Never mind, I’ve been a mother to you.”

“Heavens, yes; you have,” Stephen replied.

He lay in his own bed in Pont Street, and nothing was much changed in his room from what it had been for years; a temple and workshop of flight. Pictures of birds, of bats and of butterflies and of man-made aircraft covered the walls. The skeleton of a flying fox shared the glass case of a flying fish. A long workmanlike table stretched the length of the room—a table stacked with orderly piles of plans and designs, groups of models, trays of “parts” and of tools. Every book in the room (and they were many) treated of the air and air navigation. “Not a novel in the whole show,” Angela had told her husband disgustedly. And on Stephen’s desk lay a half-finished manuscript positively bristling with small detail drawings of rotary and fixed engines, sketches of exhaust manifolds and working diagrams of many-bladed propellers, his pen beside it, as he had left it on the last day he had journeyed to Oxshott.

The woman bustled about the room and the man lay and watched her, a gentler look in his eyes than those poor anxious organs had shown for years.

“That’s a wonderful frock,” he said lazily.

“Great Scott, and I with no apron on! Why didn’t you tell me before?” she said excitedly, and dashed to the chest of drawers, opened one drawer, and shook out a voluminous apron, all-covering as a hospital apron, but more decorative.

“It’s a shame to cover it,” Stephen objected.

“It’s my going-away dress, the very first dress Angela M. Latham ever was hooked and laced into, and you needn’t think I’m going to spill ox tail soup, Top Bronnen water, peaches and wine over it. The chinchilla it’s trimmed with cost eighty guineas, and every inch of the lace cost half a crown—hand crocheted.” She relentlessly tied the frilled and ribboned strings of the apron about her slim waist. “If you like this, I wonder what you’d have said to my wedding dress. I’m going to be painted in it—by one of the very biggest big-bugs. I want Poynter, because he’s the president of the brush and paint boys, and the president seemed about the right thing to draw an American’s picture, but Horace says Poynter doesn’t do portraits. My wedding dress was—well, really it was—and I designed it two minutes after we were engaged. Quick work. It was velvet, just not white, the faintest, loveliest tinge of green you ever saw; there was white fox at the hem, not too much, that’s half the art of dressing—narrow really in front, but it widened out as it went around till it measured over two feet at the very back. And my bonnet, not much bigger than a big butterfly, nothing but pearls and one ear of point lace, lined with green—emerald green to show it up—You’re not listening.”

“Look here,” Stephen told her. “You are simply marking time. You have something to tell me, and you are nervous and afraid to say it. The sooner such things are said and done with the better. But first there are one or two things I want to know, that I must know and am going to know. So we’ll have them now, please.”

“I quite agree,” Angela said, relieved at the prospect of the immediate passing of a tension. “Fire ahead. Question number one?”

“I want to know just what happened—when I was taken ill—what happened afterwards and all along. My mind’s a bit blank. But first tell me about—Helen.”

Angela busied herself desperately at the toilet-table, dusting already speckless silver with her absurd apron, sniffing interrogatively at toilet bottles with the contents of which she was perfectly familiar, moving brushes recklessly, but she answered briskly, and with merciful promptitude.

“They were married six weeks ago. No fuss, not even a cake, a gray dress plainer’n plain. A week knocking about in a motor-car, Heaven knows where. Hugh is doing some fool thing or other at the War Office. Temporary something or other. He goes back to the front next week. Now I’ll go back to the beginning and tell you everything.”

“Please don’t,” Stephen said grimly. “Just the important items briefly.”

“Right-o,” Mrs. Latham said amicably, perching herself on the foot of the bed—“perfectly plain, no trimming, no colored lights, no slow music. Well! Helen found a paper that cleared Hugh. There were Tommies in the morning room, or somewhere, sent to arrest Hugh, but when he and Horace went in, nary a Tommy was there—and the silver was all right too—and not even the beer touched. Barker had got rid of them—charmed them away: awfully clever girl, Barker, only your aunt never could see it. Well, Hugh couldn’t be arrested because there was nobody there to arrest him, but he went up to Whitehall the next day with Horace and Sir Somebody Something who’s no end of a lawyer and a very big-wig, and after a few miles of your charming British red tape, well, that was O.K.! See? Forgiven. Forgotten. Commission restored.” She slid from the bed and strutted daintily about the room tooting the Anthem from an imaginary bugle, its mouthpiece her own sparkling hand. It was a pretty piece of burlesque—delicately done—and briefly.

Pryde waited quietly; it was simplest, easiest so, he thought, and far quickest. “Rule, Britannia,” followed the Anthem, “John Brown’s Body” followed “Rule, Britannia,” and then she discoursed “Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles.” But Pryde was invulnerable, not to be teased as Horace Latham was; and she ceased as suddenly as she had begun and perched back on the bed. “By the way,” she said, “Hugh burned that—that—document thing Helen’d found in the Thackeray book—or perhaps it was Charlotte BrontË, or ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ We Southerners don’t think any too much of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”

“Burned it?” Stephen said sharply. “Are you sure?”

“Quite.” Mrs. Latham nodded.

“Why?”

“You can search me. But far’s I remember, it was to get rid of it—and that seems a likely reason. I think Hugh said it wouldn’t be needed again. Helen is ‘Bransby’s’—no one else could make any trouble—and something had been fixed up—all hunky-dorey and everything.”

“Was—was she willing—willing it should be burned?”

“She was not. But Hugh had his way. Men do in this upside-down, inside-out old country. But I bet you a gooseberry to a guinea Horace Latham won’t—not so you’d notice it.”

“I decline the wager,” Pryde told her. “Go on.”

“Well, you—you were feverish, and fancied all sorts of things that time—when the paper was found. Thought you saw things.”

“I saw Uncle Dick, if that’s what you mean,” Stephen said quietly. “I know I’ve been very ill—had brain fever, and all that—but I did see Uncle Dick. It was no delusion.”

Angela nodded gravely. “Of course you did. I’ve never doubted it for a moment. Isn’t it perfectly wonderful—oh!—if they’d only let the Spiritualists run this war, we’d have the poor old Kaiser dished in a jiff. But they won’t.”

“No, probably not,” Pryde concurred. “Go on.”

“I am going on—as fast as I can. Well, you sailed out of the library, the night you fell ill, and went up to your room, and rammed some things in a bag—Horace followed you up and found you doing it. He saw you were queer, and he ordered you to bed, but you just ordered him out of your room and left the house. No one could stop you. I don’t think Hugh or Horace really wanted to: anyway they couldn’t and they didn’t. You piled up here to London. Where you went here or what you did here, I can’t tell you, for nobody knows. But two days after you left Oxshott, I was having tea in my sitting-room at my hotel—I’d come up to hustle my dressmakers—when in you walked. You were as mad as six March hares—and in about five minutes you fell down with a fit.”

“Fit?” Stephen said it rather indignantly.

“Well—if it wasn’t, it was a pretty good imitation one. I called it a fit. Horace called it something in Latin. And you began saying things you’d no business to say, so I wasn’t going to call any one in. So I just got you into the next room, and on to the bed.”

“You?”

“Me!”

“But you couldn’t.”

“No, of course I couldn’t. But I did. You can’t faze an American woman. We’re not made that way. You’re not so awfully heavy, and I just hauled and twisted until I’d done it. You never know till you try. I don’t go in much for horses—I never did. But once I held a runaway team of Blue Grass Kentuckies for three miles on the Shell Road, outside ’Frisco. They pulled. But I held on. And I slowed them down all right in the end. I got you on to the bed and telephoned for Horace. No strangers wanted! You fussed about a bit—but I managed.”

“Why did you bother?” he asked in a curious tone. Her answer was prompt. “Because I like you. I always have liked you—very much indeed.”

The sick man’s thin hand crept over the eiderdown and rested on hers.

“Horace came,” she continued, “and we bundled you up in blankets and things and brought you around here. At first I said you shouldn’t be moved. But Horace said you’d be better here than so near Bond Street, and, after all, he’s a doctor. So—well, we just moved you.”

“And you’ve nursed me ever since.”

“I’ve done most of it,” Angela said proudly. “I’m some nurse. I always was. And you did talk so. Talk about women! I simply couldn’t let a stranger come pothering. You were very ill, but you soon got better, and Mr. Grant helped me.”

“Yes—I’ve known he was here.” Stephen had thought Grant on guard for Helen and Hugh. He knew better now. He lay for a while very quiet, thinking it over.

“He stayed with you all the time the week we were married. It didn’t take long—getting married doesn’t take long, if you go about it the right way.”

“It takes more than a lifetime sometimes,” Stephen said bitterly.

Angela rubbed his thin hand against her face. “I know, dear,” she said.

“You had a very short honeymoon. Was that on my account?”

“Four days. Yes, you poor child, I wasn’t going to leave you too long.”

Stephen said nothing. He couldn’t—say anything.

“Are you happy?” he asked after a time.

“Me and Horace? Oh! so-so.” But she dimpled and flushed eloquently. “So-so—but our troubles have begun already: servants. Horace’s have all given us notice—the silly old frumps. They don’t like me chattering German all over the house. You English haven’t much sense of humor, and English servants have none. Noah—the butler, his name is Ryder, but I call him ‘Noah,’ he’s been with Horace since the flood—Noah sulked whenever I spoke to him in German, and the housekeeper was rude. Well, I bundled her off lickety-click. Then I began to teach Horace German. He read it well enough, but his accent was awful. So I took him in hand. And last night—after dinner—he’d been singing to me—the sweetest love song ever made—in Germany—don’t you think so? ‘Du bist wie eine Blume, So hold, und schÖn und rein!’—The head parlor-maid and the cook—and the buttons and all the rest, flounced in and gave notice in a bunch. When this war’s over, I shall send to a woman I know in Hong Kong to send me a boat-load of decent servants. I never had real-servant comfort but once in all my life—and that was in ’Frisco, where every maid we had was a Chinaman.”

“I doubt if they’d fit in in Harley Street,” Stephen said lazily. “I’d try ’em at Oxshott first, if I were you.”

“They’ll fit in anywhere; that’s the beauty of them. I’ll have them in both places—no fear! I’m not very sure that I like Harley Street—and there isn’t a nook, or a twist or a turn in our entire house. But I’m going to have Horace stick a roof-garden on.”

“Why don’t you make him move?”

“He won’t. I’ve told him to over and over. Oh! I can manage Horace easy enough—except where his profession comes in; he will have his own way there—and, after all, he is a doctor, you know.”

Pryde smiled.

“Have you thought of what you’d do the next few years?” Angela asked rather timidly when some silent moments had passed.

“A deuce of a lot!”

“Well—that’s one of the two things I want to talk about, only it’s hard to begin. But I’ve got it all planned—every bit—”

Stephen Pryde laughed.

“You’ve nothing at all to do, but agree—not a thing. First of all, guess who’s coming?”

“Hugh?”

The woman nodded.

“I’d rather he didn’t.”

“I know,” she said—“but please—”

Pryde shrugged his shoulder against the pillow. “Oh! all right. What does it matter? He coming here? When?”

Mrs. Latham glanced at the clock. “In about half an hour.”