"There's another patient waiting. They've put me on double special since you are better." She nodded to him and went out.
He watched her go, almost regretfully. It was wonderful what a difference it made, wanting to have people around—now that money could not get between.... He would have liked to talk with the girl. Ask her about her family and how she came to be a nurse. He wondered what sort of a home a girl like that had come out of, and what she expected to do.
More than once, as he had watched her moving about the room, absorbed in her work, he had thought of Julian.... It occurred to him to wonder what Julian would be like now. He had not seen the boy for two years—not since he sent him off to Europe. He glanced a little resentfully at the black-edged card lying on the stand beside him.... If it had not been for Julia Cawein and her airs and fascinations, the boy would be here now.
His thought recurred to the girl who had just left him. He had never seen any one work just the way she worked—as if she loved it. She moved quietly and easily, as if there were plenty of time to do all that must be done in the day.... She would make a good wife for some man.... And it suddenly struck him that a rich young fellow would be lucky to marry a girl like that.... He wondered when Julian would be coming home.
[XXII]
He had finished his dinner and pushed aside the tray. He wondered where Julian was—whether he had got his letter and whether he would care—a little.... It was ten days now since he sent the letter—just before the doctor told him ... that was the day Aunt Jane took charge of his case.
He smiled a little, thinking of Aunt Jane and her ways.... Since she took him in hand, he had eaten and breathed and slept only as she permitted.... But, after all, it was a relief to get rid of thinking and do what one was told—like a boy.... He wished his own boy were here—to play with.... He found his imagination always coming back to Julian. He had hardly thought of the boy before as an individual; he had been a responsibility—some one to be kept out of scrapes—and, in a vague way, he was the successor to the Medfield fortune and business.... Now he wondered what the boy was really like.... Two years might have changed him—body and soul almost.
He closed his eyes a little wearily, and rested back against the pillows. The room was quiet and filled with sunshine. He felt suddenly at home in it—as he had never felt at home in his own house across the town.... The rooms were very lonely there.... He rested quietly.