After three nervously anxious days Nina Darling journeyed back to London and reopened her flat at Mayfair—a very different Nina indeed from the frolicsome Nina who went to Puddlewood to display her restored beauty.
The duke's story concerning Kneedrock had distressed her woefully. As a girl, in spite of her high-spirited independence and honey-bee proclivity of sipping sweets where she found them, she had loved him deeply, and since his return from self-banishment—since the one great tragedy of her life at Umballa—she had found in him her sole rock of dependence. Stubborn—cruel often at times as he was—she nevertheless felt and knew that while he reprobated and deplored her seeming lightness of character, yet deep in his soul he still held her very dear.
From what she had learned—but which she still hoped to prove grossly exaggerated—she was now more than ever convinced that this was true.
How profoundly he had been stirred and hurt by her wilful follies this awful climax—oh, it couldn't, it must not be true—demonstrated as nothing else, either word or action, could possibly have done.
Selfishly, for her own passing pleasure, she had driven men to intemperance, to exile, to self-destruction even; and now, as a fitting culmination in lex talionis—the one strong man of all, the king, the god she worshiped, had succumbed, they told her, in more awful plight than any of the others.
In her extremity Nina wired to Bath, bidding Gerald Andrews come to her at once. Then she sat down and waited.
He came by the first train, yet the intervening time seemed endless. And he found her pale and haggard, with purple crescents beneath dull, tired eyes; for in twenty-four hours she had neither eaten nor slept. It was nine o'clock at night, and the rain, driven by an east wind, was beating against the windows like an avalanche.
"Gerald," she greeted, giving him the tips of cold fingers, "you are so good. I need you terribly."
"You are ill," he said at once. "What have you been doing?"
She told him briefly what she had heard.