in the back, that she was always a pleasure to look at. And
if she was not quite so practical as she might have been, that was not
everything; and she would never get stout, as there was every danger of
Clara doing. So that from the first she had always put a good face on
her. Derek's voice interrupted her thoughts:

"I'm awfully thirsty, Granny."

"Yes, darling. Don't move your head; and just let me pop in some of this
delicious lemonade with a spoon."

Nedda, returning, found her supporting his head with one hand, while with
the other she kept popping in the spoon, her soul smiling at him lovingly
through her lips and eyes.

CHAPTER XXXII

Felix went back to London the afternoon of Frances Freeland's
installation, taking Sheila with him. She had been 'bound over to keep
the peace'--a task which she would obviously be the better able to
accomplish at a distance. And, though to take charge of her would be
rather like holding a burning match till there was no match left, he felt
bound to volunteer.

He left Nedda with many misgivings; but had not the heart to wrench her
away.

The recovery of a young man who means to get up to-morrow is not so rapid
when his head, rather than his body, is the seat of trouble. Derek's
temperament was against him. He got up several times in spirit, to find
that his body had remained in bed. And this did not accelerate his
progress. It had been impossible to dispossess Frances Freeland from
command of the sick-room; and, since she was admittedly from experience
and power of paying no attention to her own wants, the fittest person for
the position, there she remained, taking turn and turn about with Nedda,
and growing a little whiter, a little thinner, more resolute in face, and
more loving in her eyes, from day to day. That tragedy of the old--the
being laid aside from life before the spirit is ready to resign, the
feeling that no one wants you, that all those you have borne and brought
up have long passed out on to roads where you cannot follow, that even
the thought-life of the world streams by so fast that you lie up in a
backwater, feebly, blindly groping for the full of the water, and always
pushed gently, hopelessly back; that sense that you are still young and
warm, and yet so furbelowed with old thoughts and fashions that none can
see how young and warm you are, none see how you long to rub hearts with
the active, how you yearn for something real to do that ca