“Doris,” he said very bravely indeed, “Dr. Lawton says it won’t do Clive any harm at all to see you after he has slept off the quarter-grain of morphia he gave him. He says it may do him a lot of good. I’ll tell the nurse to let you know when he wakes.”
Then, not trusting himself to say more lest he lose the pleasant smile he maintained with such sore-hearted difficulty, he went quickly out again, hurrying upstairs on his errand to the nurse.
His soul was heavy within him. Before the war he knew Clive Creede had been his dangerous rival for Doris’s favor. Time and again Vail had had to battle against pettiness in order to avoid rancor toward this lifelong chum of his.
Then, after the supposed Clive’s return from overseas, Vail had been ashamed of his own joy in noting that Doris’s interest in Creede seemed to have slackened, although the man himself was still eagerly her suitor.
And now—now that the real Clive was back—surrounded by the glamour of mystery and of unmerited misfortune—the real Clive, whose first question had been for Doris—Thaxton Vail’s air-castles and the golden dreams that peopled them seemed tottering to a crash.
Chapter XVIII
WHEN HE CAME HOME
YES, manfully Vail climbed the stairs to the anteroom, where the severely stiff and iodoform-perfumed nurse sat primly reading while her patient slept. Across the threshold of the sick chamber lay stretched a tawny and fluffy bulk.
There, since the moment Clive Creede had been carried in, had lain Macduff. At nobody’s orders would he desert his self-chosen post of guard to his stricken master. He ate practically nothing, and he drank little more.
Several times a day Vail dragged him from the doorway with gentle force and put him out of the house. But ever, by hook or crook, the collie made his way in again, and fifteen minutes later he would be pressing close against the door on whose farther side was Clive.
Again and again he tried to slip past nurse or doctor into the sickroom. Again and again nurse or doctor trod painfully on him in the dark as he lay there.