Now that his first derangement was over, he was glad to see her. Tira might not come. If she did, he could do something. He could even, at a pinch and with Tira's consent, put the knowledge of the tawdry business into Nan's hands. But she would not sit down. Plainly she had received a setback. She was refusing to accept his hospitality to any informal extent. And he saw he had hurt her. He was always reading the inner minds of people, and that was where his disastrous sympathy was forever leading him: to that pernicious yielding, that living of other people's lives and not his own.
"It was only," he said, trying to pick up the lost thread of her confidence, "that I didn't expect you. I couldn't have dreamed of your coming. How did you come so early?"
"Took the early train," said Nan curtly.
"Not the beastly old thing that starts before light?"
She nodded.
"What for?"
"To get ahead of them," she answered, still curtly.
"Them? Who?"
"Dick and his mother and Doctor Brooke."
"Dick and Amelia? What's Amelia on here for?"