"To America!" Napier repeated, slightly dazed.
"It would be everything to have him out of England till the war is over." Julian's mother had broached the idea to Miss Nan. "I've had my eye on that young woman. It's true she takes Julian's mad ideas for the law and the prophets, but so a wife should. Julian might do worse, don't you agree?"
"Then—they're engaged!" was all that Napier could bring out.
"Not properly engaged, I gather. But when was Julian properly anything? The girl's no fool. She has naturally thought we shouldn't like it, so I took occasion to say a word to her. She looked rather confused," said the lady reflectively. "She must have been confused, for what do you think she said? That I had misunderstood. That she had never said she would marry Julian. I told her he was an odd creature, but I was sure that was what he wanted. 'And I can't be wrong in thinking you care for him,' I said. And then she burst out with: 'How can I help caring about anybody with such a perfectly beautiful nature as Julian!' Wasn't that American?" Lady Grant smiled. "I told her I would make Sir James see it as I did, and that it would all come right."
Julian's way of helping it all to "come right" was to employ his convalescence in carrying on the propaganda from his sick bed with unabated ardor; or, rather, an ardor increased by the excitement of its transmission largely through Nan Ellis.
That name of "Messenger" which Napier had secretly given her recurred to him again and again. Messenger, indeed! carrying contraband, not to say high explosive, to and from the sober precincts of Berkeley Street!
The worst of it was that Nan showed no sign of revolt against being made the agent of this traffic. The cold truth was that she liked it. That was the heart-breaking thing about the whole sorry business. She would come back from private talks with Julian's revolutionary friends, from semi-public meetings, electric with excitement, brimming with her news. Julian's eagerness to hear and hers to tell did not always await the more private hour.
Nan's air of tumbling it all out, equally without selective care and without consciousness of offense, did much to ease the situation between Julian and his mother. Their relationship had been too embittered to allow them any more to discuss these things. And here was some one wholly forgetting, if she had ever heard, that constraint-breeding, melancholy fact; some one who pronounced the words abhorred in an even, every-day voice, smiled the while, and sat at her ease. Too newly Julian had skirted death for his mother not to make shift to endure that which first brought back the hues and lights of life to the corpse-white face.
Lady Grant did, to be sure, tighten her lips and stiffen her back in face of some of the talk that went on across her son's paper-strewn bed-table.
During one of Napier's visits, he had seen her rise and leave the room. When she came back, she found Julian laughing as he hadn't for many a day. Ultimately Lady Grant was able to confront the familiar mention of persons ostracized and implications outrageous with that patience women know how to draw upon in dealing with their sick.