"What's all this?" he asked quietly. "Where am I, and who are you?"
"Oh, that's all right," said Nellie Pope.
"Yes,--that is, a nursing home," she said.
"What on earth was that filth that he gave me to drink? I carried the books into his room, and then I'm hanged if I can remember--I've got a most frightful headache. Every time I move my head seems to split in half. How long have I been here? Was I poisoned, or what?"
"Now don't you talk or you'll get me into trouble. You go off to sleep like a good boy. You'll be all right in the morning."
"Shall I? That's good." And he heaved a big sigh and obeyed. It was extraordinary how sleep came to his rescue.
He was still asleep when Graham came back at six o'clock. Nellie Pope opened the door to him. "'E's getting on fine," she said. "You can take that line out of your forehead. 'E's been talking quite sensibly to me. What I don't know about your father and your family isn't worth knowing."
Graham tiptoed into the bedroom, drew a chair up to the side of the bed and sat down. And while he waited for the time to arrive for Peter's next dose many strange things ran through his brain,--his own precocity--his own desire to be smart and become a man of the world--his own evening in the little shabby theatrical lodgings in Oxford with Kenyon--his dealings with Ita Strabosck--the night he had spent in his bed-room when Peter took his razors away--that awful hour when he sneaked into his father's laboratory and under the pressure of great trouble forged his name. The only thing that gave him any sense of pleasure out of all this was the fact that he carried in his pocket a warm and spontaneous letter from Ranken Townsend, which he knew would be better to Peter than pints of medicine.
And while he sat watching, Nellie Pope ate her sausage in the kitchen and finished the instalment of the love story in her magazine.
It was late when Graham let himself into his father's house that night. He had done many things that day. He had also been through much anxiety. He felt that he deserved the right to turn in at once and sleep the sleep of the just. But Kenyon had said that Belle had been alone in his rooms the night before and the queer expression that had come into his eyes as he made the remark lived most uneasily in Graham's memory. He now knew Nicholas Kenyon to be a skunk--an unscrupulous individualist devoid of loyalty, incapable of feeling true friendship and in every way unfit to have any dealings, unwatched, with a girl unless she was in his own set or belonged to the same class as the two chorus girls for whom he had waited outside the stage door of the Oxford Theatre.