'Well, you wouldn't wish him to be miserable?'
'I should have no objection at all to his being miserable,' said Cicely calmly, 'but I am not such a fool as to suppose that I should ever know it, if he were.'
Cicely took up a stalk of grass, and began to bite it. Her eyes seemed on fire. Nelly was suddenly aware of the flaming up of fierce elemental things in this fashionably dressed young woman whose time was oddly divided between an important share in the running of her brother's hospital, and a hungry search after such gaieties as a world at war might still provide her with. She could spend one night absorbed in some critical case, and eagerly rendering the humblest V.A.D. service to the trained nurses whom her brother paid; and the next morning she would travel to London in order to spend the second night in one of those small dances at great houses of which she had spoken to Nelly, where the presence of men just come from, or just departing to, the firing line lent a zest to the talk and the flirting, the jealousies and triumphs of the evening that the dances of peace must do without. Then after a morning of wild spending in the shops she would take a midday train back to Cumberland and duty.
Nelly, looking at her, wondered afresh how they had ever come to be friends. Yet they were friends, and her interest in Cicely's affairs was one of the slender threads drawing her back to life.
It had all happened when she was ill at the flat; after that letter from the Geneva Red Cross which reported that in spite of exhaustive enquiries among German hospitals, and in the prisoners' camps no trace of Lieutenant Sarratt could be found. On the top of the letter, and the intolerable despair into which it had plunged her, had come influenza. There was no doubt--Nelly's recollection faced it candidly--that she would have come off badly but for Cicely. Bridget had treated the illness on the hardening plan, being at the moment slightly touched with Christian Science. Nelly should 'think it away.' To stay in bed and give in was folly. She meanwhile had found plenty to do in London, and was away for long hours. In one of these absences, Cicely--having been seized with a sudden hunger for the flesh-pots of 'town'--appeared at the flat with her maid. She discovered Nelly Sarratt in bed, and so weak as to be hardly capable of answering any question. Mrs. Simpson was doing her best; but she gave an indignant account of Bridget's behaviour, and Cicely at once took a strong line, both as a professional nurse--of sorts--and as mistress of the flat. Bridget, grimly defensive, was peremptorily put on one side, and Cicely devoted the night she was to have spent in dancing to tending her half-conscious guest. In the days that followed she fell, quite against her will, under the touching charm of Nelly's refinement, humility and sweetness. Her own trenchant and masterful temper was utterly melted, for the time, by Nelly's helpless state, by the grief which threatened to kill her, and by a gratefulness for any kindness shewn her, which seemed to Cicely almost absurd.