Joan pushed her gently into the dining-room; it was all in confusion, with the remnants of luncheon still on the table. "Don't cry, dear," she said. "Try to tell me what has happened."
Mrs. Ogden dried her eyes, clinging to Joan's hand the while. Her soft greyish hair was untidy, escaping from the net. "The cure was too severe for him; he ought never to have gone to London; he didn't want to go and they forced him, the brutes! He got worse and they sent him home two days ago; they said he was quite fit to travel and had better get home, but he wasn't fit to travel—that's the way they get rid of their responsibilities. And the nurses at that home were inhuman devils. I told them so; he hated them all. He seemed better yesterday, but this morning he fainted, and when the doctor came he put him to bed. He's there now, and oh, Joan, he's groaning! They say he's not in pain, but of course he must be, and sometimes he knows me, and sometimes he's delirious and thinks he's back in India."
"Come upstairs," said Joan drearily. "I want to see him."
The familiar bedroom was not familiar any longer; it looked strange and austere as Joan entered. The blinds were down, flapping in the draught from the windows. A large fire blazing in the grate added to the sense of something important and portentous that hung about the place. On the bed lay a strange figure; someone whom Joan felt she had never seen before. Its face was unnaturally pale and shrunken and so were the wandering hands extended on the coverlet. This stranger moaned incessantly, and turned his head from side to side; his eyes were open and blank.
Joan took one of the wandering hands in hers: "Father!" she said softly.
He looked through her and beyond, breathing with an effort.
A quiet tap came on the door and the nurse, hastily summoned from the Cottage Hospital, came in. She was a pink-faced, competent-looking girl, and wore her cloak and bonnet. She took in the situation at a glance.
"I'll just take off my things," she said, "and be back in a minute."
Presently the doctor came again. He said very little, and pressing Mrs. Ogden's limp hand, departed. The nurse, now in charge, had rendered the bedroom still more unfamiliar, with her temperature chart, and a table covered with a clean white towel, upon which she had set out strange little appliances that they did not know the use of. When she spoke she did so in a loud whisper, glancing ever and anon towards the figure on the bed. Her cuffs creaked and so did her shoes. A smell of disinfectant was everywhere; they wondered what it was, it was unfriendly, but no one dared to question this empress ruling over the kingdom of Death.
The colonel belonged to her now; they all felt it, and submitted without a protest. He was hers to do as she pleased with, to turn in the bed or to leave in discomfort, to raise up or lay down. She it was who moistened his lips with cotton wool, soaked in a solution of her own making. Sometimes she opened his mouth and moistened his tongue as well. He lay there utterly helpless and unable to protest, while she subjected him to countless necessary indignities. Her trained hands, hard and deft, permitted of no resistance, doing their work quietly and without emotion. It seemed horrible to Joan to see him brought so low, but she, like the rest of the household, stood back respectfully, bowing to the realization that only three beings had any control over her father now: the doctor, the nurse—and Death.