An ugly suspicion crept slowly into his mind. He looked at the bed with its frilled pillows, at the flower papered bare walls, at the rather worn blue carpet, at the flimsy wrap hanging limply on a peg on the door of the bath-room, at the little bed-room slippers tucked away beneath one of the white, painted chairs——
He turned and called out: "Nurse! Nurse!"
Something in his tone brought Nellie Pope in quickly.
He was standing with his hand on the big brass knob of the bed. "You told me that this was a nursing home," he said.
The girl laughed. How should she know what Peter had done with his life—of the ideal that he kept so steadily in front of him? She only knew the other kind of men. "So it is," she said. "It's my home and I've had to be your nurse. Pretty well put, I think. Don't you? 'Ow d'you feel, dearie? A bit groggy on your pins?"
The girl's cockney accent, her made-up face, her cheap, smart clothes were noticed by him for the first time. Her insinuating, cheerful manner and that sort of hail-fellow-well-met intimacy that was all about her, came to him with a new and appalling meaning. He had been spoken to by just such women in London after dark, and on Broadway and its side streets as he passed. They belonged to the night life of all great cities. They were the moths who came out attracted by the glare of electric light. Good God! What was he doing in that place?
The keen remembrance of this woman's inestimable kindness, the supreme lack of selfishness which had inspired her to bend so frequently over his bed, the charity of her treatment of him as he lay ill and helpless, made him anxious above everything else not to hurt her feelings. But there were things that he must know at once,—urgent, vital things which might affect all the rest of his life. There was Betty his love-girl—the girl who was to be his wife—who was waiting for him with the most exquisite and whole-hearted trust——
"I want you to tell me how I came here," he said.
Nellie Pope went over to the dressing-table. "That's easy," she replied lightly, adding a new coat of color to her lips. "The night before last, not having 'ad any luck, I was 'aving a last look round and 'appened to be in Forty-eighth Street just as you staggered out of a 'ouse on the arm of a young gent. I reckoned 'e didn't 'ave any use for me, being outside 'is own place, but I passed 'im the usual greetin' from force of 'abit, just as 'e 'ad called up a taxi. With a funny look on 'is face,—a curly smile I called it to meself,—'e suddenly gave me orders, lumped you into the cab, blind to the wide, and told me to get in and take you 'ome, and 'elp meself to any money you 'ad on you. Well, I did, and the next instalment of the serial you know as well as I do. Feeling weak, old dear?"
Peter sat heavily on the foot of the bed.