Five days later, Medway, one morning, recognized the Colonel. "Why, my dear father, what are you doing here?... What's it all about?" His feeble voice died away; without waiting for an answer, he lapsed into a kind of semi-consciousness. Out of this, day by day, though, he came more strongly. Directly he appeared to accept, without further curiosity, his father's occasional presence in the room. Another interval, and he began to question the physician and nurses. "Back, eh?—and leg, and this thing on my head. I don't remember.—A kind of crash.... What happened?"

Evasive answers did for a while, but it was evident that they would not do for ever. In the end it was Thomson who told him.

"You did, did you!" exclaimed the doctor in the outer room. "Well, I don't know but what it's just as well!"

"I couldn't help it, sir. He pinned me down."

The Colonel spoke. "Just what and how much did you tell him?"

"I told him, sir, about the wreck, and how he got beaten about, and how I fastened him, when he was senseless and we were sinking, to a bit of spar, and how we were picked up with some of the crew about dawn. And about his being brought here, and being very well cared for, and your coming from New York, you and Miss Ashendyne, and that he'd been wonderful close to dying, but was all right now, and what the date was, and things like that, sir."

"Did he ask for his wife?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you told him?"

"Yes, sir."

The doctor rose. "Well, I'm glad it's done. I'll go see—" and disappeared into the sick-room.

"I think you did well, Thomson," said the Colonel. "When you've got to take a thing, you'd better stand up and take it, and the quicker the better."

"Yes, sir," said Thomson; and adjusted the jalousies, it being now very warm and the glare at times insupportable.

The Colonel, under the guidance of a dragoman of the best, had been shopping, and was in white duck. Hagar, too, had secured from a French shop muslin and nainsook.

Thomson had been concerned for her lack of any maid or female companionship. He had gently broached the subject a week or two before. "Mrs. Ashendyne had an excellent maid, Miss, who was with us on the yacht that night and was saved. But she's of a high-wrought nature, and the shock and cold and everything rather laid her up. She has a brother who is a photographer in Cairo, having married a native woman, and she's gone to stay with him awhile, before she goes back into service. If that hadn't been the case, Miss, you might, if you wished, have taken her on. I think she would have given satisfaction. As it is, Miss, I know some English people with a shop here, and I think through them I could find you some one. She would not be a superior lady's maid like CÉcile, but—"

Hagar had declined the offer. "I never had a maid, thank you, Thomson. I can do for myself very well."

She liked Thomson, and Thomson agreed with the nurse that she was a considerate young lady. Now, having adjusted the blinds, Thomson left the room.

The Colonel paced up and down, his hands behind him. The white duck was becoming; he did not look sixty. Hair, mustache, and imperial were quite grey; except for that he had never aged to Hagar's eyes. His body had the same height and swing, the same fine spareness; his voice kept the same rich inflections, all the way from mellow and golden to the most corroding acid; he dominated, just as she remembered him in her childhood. Not all of his two weeks in Egypt had been spent by Medway's bedside; he had been fairly over Alexandria, and to Meks and Ramleh, and even afield to AbÛkir and Rosetta. He had offered to take her with him upon these later excursions, but she had refused. The brother of her father's wife was going with him, and she correctly thought that they would be freer without her. The Colonel acquiesced. "I dare say you'll have chances enough to see things, Gipsy." It was her first intimation that any one had in mind her staying....

Now the Colonel, after pacing awhile, spoke reflectively. "At this rate it won't be long before he's really well enough to talk. I'll have to have several talks with him. Did you gather, Gipsy, that Thomson had told him that he would remain crippled?"

"I do not think he told him that, grandfather."

"That's going to be the shock," said the Colonel. "Well, he'll have to be told! I think Thomson—or the doctor—had better do it. And then he'll have to learn about that will. Altogether, it may delay his convalescence a little. Of course, I'll stay until he's practically recovered—as far as he can recover."

"Do you think that ... perhaps ... he might like to go home—to go home to Gilead Balm?"

"Not," answered the Colonel, "if I know Medway, and I think I do! To come back, crippled, after all these primrose years—to sleep in his old room, and Maria's—to sit on the porch and listen to Bob and Serena—No!"

That night in her own room Hagar placed two candles on the table, took a sheet of paper and a pencil, and sitting down, made a calculation. The night was warm to oppression; through the windows came the indefinite, hot, thick murmur of the evening city. Hagar sat with bare arms and throat and loosened hair. She wrote her name, Hagar Ashendyne, and her age, and then, an inch below, a little table,—

After a pause the pencil moved on. "Many stories in mind, one partly written. The monthly says I can write and will make a name." It paused, then moved again. "To earn a living. To live where life is simple and doesn't cost much. If I go on, and I will go on, I could live at Gilead Balm on what I make, and help keep up the place. If ever I had to live by myself, I could get two or three rooms in a city and live there. Or maybe a small house, and have Thomasine with me. In another year or two years, I can keep myself. I do not want to stay here when grandfather goes. Where there is no love and honour, what is the use? It isn't as though he needed me—he doesn't—or wanted me—"

She laid the pencil down and leaned back in the deep chair. Her eyes grew less troubled; a vague relief and calm came into her face, and she smiled fleetingly. "If he doesn't think he needs me or wants me,—and I don't believe he'll think so,—then there isn't anything surer than that I won't stay." She rose and paced the room. "I shouldn't worry, Hagar!"

Some days after this, she offered one afternoon to relieve the nurse. She had done this before and frequently. Heretofore the service had consisted, since the patient almost always slept through the afternoon, in sitting quietly in the darkened chamber and dreaming her own dreams for an hour or two, when the grateful nurse came back refreshed. To-day she was presently aware that he was awake; that he was lying there with his eyes open, regarding the slow play of light and shadow upon the ceiling. She had found out, on those earlier occasions, that he did not discriminate between her and the usual nurse; when he roused himself to demand water he had looked no farther than the glass held by her hand to his lips. Now, as she felt at once as with a faint electric shock, it was going to be different. He spoke presently. His voice, though halting and much weakened, resembled the Colonel's golden, energetic drawl.

"What time is it?"

"Five o'clock."

"What day of the month?"

She told him. "Alexandria in April!" he said. "What impossible things happen!"

She did not answer, and he fell silent, lying there staring at the ceiling. In a few minutes he asked for water. The glass at his lips, she felt that he looked with curiosity first at the hand which held it, and then at her face. "Water tastes good," he said, "doesn't it?"

"Yes, it does." She put down the glass and returned to her seat.

"You aren't," he said, "the nurse I've had."

"No; she will be back presently."

There followed another pregnant silence; then: "A beautiful string of impossibilities. I know the Colonel's here—been here a long time. Now, did I dream it or did Thomson tell me that he'd brought my daughter with him?"

"Thomson told you."

Medway lay quite quiet and relaxed. The cut over the head was nearly healed; there was now but a slight fillet-like white bandage about it. Thomson had trimmed mustache and short pointed beard; the features above were bloodless yet, but no longer sunken and ghastly; the eyes were gathering keenness and intelligence. Ashendynes and Coltsworths were alike good-looking people, and Medway had taken his share. He knew it, prized it, and bestowed upon it a proper care. Hagar wondered—wondered.

He spoke again. "Life's a variorum! I shouldn't wonder ... Hagar!"

"Yes, father?"

"Suppose you come over here, nearer. I want to see how you've 'done growed up.'"

She moved her chair until it rested full in a slant ray of sunlight, coming through the lowered blinds, then sat within the ray, as still almost as if she had been sculptured there.

Five minutes passed. "Haven't you any other name than Hagar?" said Medway. "Are they always going to call you that?"

"Grandfather calls me Gipsy—except when he doesn't like what I do."

"Does that happen often? Are you wilful?"

"I do not know," said Hagar. "I am like my mother."

When she had spoken, she repented it with a pang of fear. He was in no condition, of course, to have waked old, disturbing thoughts.

But Medway had depth on depth of sang-froid. "You look like her and you don't look like her," he murmured. "You may be like her within, but you can't be all like her. Blessings and cursings are all mixed in this life. You must be a little bit like me—Gipsy!"

"It is time," said Hagar, "for an egg beaten up in wine."

She gave it to him, standing, grave-eyed, beside the bed. "I do not think you should talk. Shut your eyes and go to sleep."

"Can you read aloud?"

"Yes, but—"

"Can you sing?"

"Not to amount to anything. But I can sing to you very low until you go to sleep, if that's what you mean—"

"All right. Sing!"

She moved from the shaft of light, and began to croon rather than to sing, softly and dreamily, bits of old songs and ballads. In ten minutes he was asleep, and in ten more the nurse returned.

The next afternoon Thomson brought her a message. "Mr. Ashendyne would like you to sit with him awhile, Miss."

She went, and took her chair by the window, the nurse leaving the room. Medway lay dozing, his eyes half-closed. After a while he woke fully and asked who was there.

"It is Hagar, father."

"Sit where you were yesterday."

She obeyed, taking again her place in the slant light. It made a gold crown for her dusky hair, slid to the hollow of her firm young throat, brought forward her slender shoulders, draped in white, and bathed her long hands, folded in her lap.

Medway lay and looked at her, coolly, as long as he pleased. "You are not at all what is called beautiful. We'll dismiss that from mind. But the people who give us our terms are mostly idiots anyhow! Beauty in the eye of the beholder—but what bats are the beholders! No, you haven't beauty, as they say, but there's something left.... I like the way you sit there, Gipsy."

"I am glad that you are pleased, father."

"I couldn't deduce you from your letters."

Her eyes met his. "I did not choose that you should."

Again she felt a quiver of pain for what she had said. She was torn between a veritable anger which now and again rose perilously near the surface and a profound pity for his broken body, and for what he would feel when he knew. Her dream of the early winter haunted her. She saw him leaving that white steamer, coming lightly and jauntily down from it to the shore, robust, with a colour in his cheeks and his white hat like a helmet. She heard again Roger Michael speaking. "We met him at Carcassonne, and afterwards at Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching most wonderfully." She saw him, moving lightly, from stone to stone in old half-ruined cities. The dandelion day and the blossoming orchard came back to her; she felt again beneath her his half-dancing motion as he carried her under the boughs where the bees were humming. Her pity, her comprehension, put the anger down.

Medway was watching her curiously. "You have a most expressive face," he said. "I do not remember you well as a child. How old were you the last time we met?"

"Five or six, I think. The clearest thing I can remember, father, is one day when you were lying under the cedars and I had been gathering dandelions and came to look at a book you had. You played with me, and I accidentally burned my finger on your cigar. Then you were very kind and lovely; you took me to grandmother to have it tied up, and then you carried me on your shoulder through the orchard, and told me 'Jack and the Beanstalk.'"

"By Jove!" said Medway. "Why, I remember that, too!... First the smell of the cedar and then the apple blossoms.... You were a queer little elf—and you entered into the morals of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' most seriously.... Good lack! Whoever forgets anything! That to come back as soft and vivid!... Well, I thought I had forgotten you clean, Gipsy, but it seems I hadn't."

"You mustn't talk too much. Shall I sing you to sleep?"

"Yes, sing!"

Just before he dozed off, he spoke again, drowsily. "Have you heard them say how many days it will be before I am on my feet again?"

"No."

"I will want to show you and the Colonel—" But she had begun to croon "Swanee River," and he went to sleep with his sentence unfinished.

The next day he spoke of his drowned wife. It came as a casual remark, but with propriety. "Anna was a good woman. There could hardly have been a more amiable one. She had experience and tact; she was utterly unexacting. She had her interests and I had mine; we lived and let live.... I cannot yet understand how she happened to have been the one—"

"She sent me her picture," said Hagar. "I thought it very handsome, and a good face, too. And the two or three letters I had from her—I have kept them."

"She was a good woman," repeated Medway. "You rarely see a tolerant woman—she was one. Her brother has told me about her will. It is true that I expected, perhaps, a fuller confidence. But it was her money—she had a right to do as she pleased. I knew that she had some unfortunate idea or other as to the origin of her wealth—but I did not conceive that her mind made so much of it.... However, I refuse to be troubled on that score. Her disposition of matters leaves me comfortable enough. I am not worrying over it. I never worry, Gipsy!"

After lying for three minutes he spoke with his inimitable liquid drawl. "When I think of all the years out of which I have squeezed enjoyment on the pettiest income—going here and going there—every nook of Europe, much of Asia and Africa—just managing to keep Thomson and myself—knowing every in and out, every rank and grade and caste, palace and hovel, chÂteau and garret, camp and atelier, knowing pictures, music, scenery, strange people and strange adventures, knowing my own kind and welcome among them—now basking like a lizard, now in action as though a tarantula had bit me—everywhere, desert and sea and city—and all on next to nothing!—making drawings when I had to (I did that one year in southern France; Carcassonne, Aigues-Mortes, NÎmes, and so forth), but usually fortunate in friends ... it seems that I might be able to manage on fifty thousand a year ... resume at the old house."

It was another week before he was told. He was growing impatient and suspicious.... The doctor did it, Thomson flunking for the first time in his existence. The doctor, having done it, came out of the room, drew a long breath, and accepted coffee from Mahomet with rather a shaking hand.

"Well?" demanded the Colonel. "Well?"

"He's perfectly game," said the doctor, "but I should say he's hard hit. However,"—he drank the coffee,—"there's one thing that a considerable experience with human nature has taught me, and that is, Colonel, that your born hedonist—and it's no disparagement to Mr. Ashendyne to call him that; quite the reverse—your born hedonist will remain hedonist still, though the heavens fall. He'll twist back to the pleasant. He's going through pretty bitter waters at the moment, but he'll get life somehow on the pleasurable plane again. All the same," mused the doctor, "he's undoubtedly suffering at present."

"I won't go in," said the Colonel. "Better fight such things out alone!"

The other nodded. "Yes, I suppose so."

But a little later Hagar went in. She waited an hour or two in her own room, sitting before a window, gazing with unseeing eyes. The heat swam and dazzled above countless flat, pale, parapetted roofs of countless houses. Palm and pepper and acacia and eucalyptus drooped in the airless day; there sounded a drone of voices; a great bird sailed slowly on stretched wings far overhead in a sky like brass. She turned and went to her father's room.

Outside she met Thomson. "Are you going in, Miss? I'm glad of that. Mr. Ashendyne isn't one of these people whom their own company suffices—"

Hagar raised sombre eyes. "I thought that my father had always been sufficient to himself—"

"Not in trouble, Miss."

He knocked at the door for her. Medway's voice answered, strangely jerky, quick, and harsh. "What is it? Come in!"

Thomson opened the door. "It's Miss Hagar, sir," then closed it upon her and glided away down the corridor.

Medway was lying well up upon his pillows, staring at the light upon the wall. He had sent away the nurse. He did not speak, and Hagar, moving quietly, went here and there in the large room, that was as large as an audience chamber. At the windows she drew the jalousies yet closer, making a rich twilight in the room. There were flowers on a table, and she brought fresh water and filled the bowl in which they lived. There were books in a small case, and, kneeling before it, she read over their titles, and taking one from the shelf went softly through it, looking at the pictures.

At last, with it still in her hand, she came to her accustomed seat near the bed. "It's a bad day for you," she said simply. "I am very sorry."

"Do you object to my swearing?"

"Not especially, if it helps you."

"It won't—I'll put it off.... Oh—h...." He turned his head and shoulders as best he could, until his face was buried in the pillows. The bed shook with his heavy, gasping sobs....

It did not last. Ashendynes were not apt long to indulge in that kind of thing. Medway pulled a good oar out of it. The room very soon became perfectly still again. When the silence was broken, he asked her what she was reading, and then if she had seen anything of the city. Presently he told her to sing. He thought he might sleep; he hadn't slept much last night. "I must have had a presentiment of this damned thing—Go on and sing!" She crooned "Dixie" and "Swanee River" and "Annie Laurie," but it was of no use. He could not sleep. "Of all things to come to me, this—!... Why, I should like to be out in the desert this minute, with a caravan.... O God!"

She brought him cool water. "I'm sorry—I'm sorry!" she said.

As she put down the glass, he held her by the sleeve. A twisted smile, half-wretched, half with a glint of cheer, crossed his face. "Do you know, Gipsy, I could grow right fond of you."