ling. 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 can help life on, and how no one will give it you! All this--this
tragedy--was for the time defeated. She was, in triumph, doing something
real for those she loved and longed to do things for. She had Sheila's
room.

For a week at least Derek asked no questions, made no allusion to
the mutiny, not even to the cause of his own disablement. It had
been impossible to tell w