Late that night Gavan left a note in Berkeley Street, to be given to Lady Grant in the morning. He told her that he had got a doctor and a nurse, and "Julian has come off better than I could have believed."
Before ten o'clock the next day Lady Grant appeared at her son's new lodging, with the avowed intention of taking him home and seeing that he was properly attended to. Julian, in a fever and many bandages, flatly refused to be moved. There was a grievous scene.
In the midst of it, in walked Miss Ellis. The same evening, comfortably established in his old Berkeley Street bedroom, Julian in a few faint sentences put Napier in possession of the issue of that encounter of the morning.
"Nan turned against me. She and my mother together are too many for me."
In those next days Gavan ran in whenever he had a quarter of an hour, to find a Julian very weak, yet in bewildering good spirits, visited daily by Nan, and even, for the term of the exigency, received back into his mother's favor.
"Do they meet, those two?" Arthur asked.
"My mother and Nan? Rather. They get along like a house afire."
If Napier had doubted that before, he doubted no longer after a little talk down in the drawing-room with Lady Grant on a certain gloomy evening toward Christmas. Whispers had begun to be heard in privileged circles of British shell shortage at the Front. The Germans had shells to spare. They had been bombarding Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby; five hundred casualties, the papers said.
In spite of all the evil news, Julian was better. You could read that in his mother's face.
"I believe he'll be able to go over to America early in the new year," she said.