"What's the matter with him, do you know?" he asked, as Mr. Catherwood came downstairs and nodded to him through the banisters. Grisel explained that it was pneumonia following on "flu," and he heard her blow her poor little nose.
Promising to come round at once, he went and explained to his host, and ten minutes later jumped out of his taxi and ran up the steps of "Happy House."
Grisel and Mrs. Walbridge were at breakfast, but Paul had hurried off straight to the house of some minor Foreign Office official whom he happened to know. Mrs. Walbridge already had her hat on, he noticed, and anything more helpless and pathetic than her haggard, tear-stained, bewildered face Oliver thought he had never seen in his life. She kissed him absent-mindedly as if he had been a son, and he sat down and Grisel plied him with food.
Grisel, who had been crying (for she and Guy were nearly of an age and had always been fond of each other), said, "You never saw him—he is such a dear! Oh, it's too cruel to have fought all through the war, and now——"
"Hush, hush," he said, patting her wrist with a fine imitation of brotherly detachment, "give the poor boy a chance. Who sent the telegram?"
"A nurse."
"H'm. Where is he?"
"He's at a private hospital. The telegram's in mother's bag."
As she spoke, the maid brought in the letters, and Grisel looked through them listlessly. One, addressed in firm, bold writing to herself, Wick knew instinctively must come from Sir John. There was only one for Mrs. Walbridge, and as Grisel handed it to her mother she said: