It was all very familiar.
“Ah, you haven’t abandoned me after all, though I have found you out,” he said to Adrienne Toner that night.
He was able at last to see her clearly as she came in, so softly that it was like a dream sliding into one’s sleep. She was like a dream in her nurse’s dress which, though so familiar on other women, seemed to isolate and make her strange. Her face was smaller than he had remembered it and had the curious look, docile yet stubborn, that one sees on the faces of dumb-mutes. She might have looked like that had she been deafened by the sound of so many bursting shells and lost the faculty of speech through doing much and saying nothing among scenes of horror. But she spoke to him, after all, as naturally as he spoke to her, saying, though with no touch of his lightness: “You mustn’t talk, you know, if I come to make you sleep. Sir Kenneth wants sleep for you more than anything else.”
“I promise you to be good,” said Oldmeadow. “But I’m really better, aren’t I? and can talk a little first.”
“You are really better. But it will take a long time. A great deal of sleeping.”
“No one knew what had become of you,” said Oldmeadow, and he remembered that he ought to be sorry that Adrienne Toner had not been killed.
She hesitated, and then sat down beside him. He thought that she had been going to ask him something and then checked herself. “I can’t let you talk,” she said, and in her voice he heard the new authority; an authority gained by long submission to discipline.
“Another night, then. We must talk another night,” he murmured, closing his eyes, for he knew that he must not disobey her. All the same it was absurd that Adrienne Toner should be doing this for him; absurd but heavenly to feel her hand fall softly, like a warm, light bird, and brood upon his forehead.
CHAPTER III
THEY never spoke of Coldbrooks, nor of Barney, nor of Palgrave; not once. Not once during all those nights that she sat beside him and made him sleep.