"

"Oh, of course," Barbara corroborated, though with no recollection of
the encounter. "I knew it was somewhere, but I couldn't quite
recall--So I felt, when the butler called me up, that I should be
here----"

"Quite so! quite so! You'll find Miss Gallifer, who's with him now, a
most competent nurse, and I shall bring a good night nurse before
evening." The professional side of the situation disposed of, he
touched tactfully on the romantic. "It will be a great thing for me to
know that in a masculine household like this a woman with knowledge
and authority is running in and out. The more you can be here, Miss
Walbrook, the more responsibility you'll take off my hands."

"May I be in his room--and help the nurse--or do anything like that?"

"Quite so! quite so! I'm sure Miss Gallifer, who can't be there every
minute of the time, you understand, will be glad to feel that there's
someone she can trust----"

"And he couldn't know I was there?"

"Not unless he returned unexpectedly to consciousness, which is
possible, you understand----"

Her distress was so great that she hazarded a question on which she
would not otherwise have ventured. "Doctor, you're a physician. I can
speak to you as I shouldn't speak to everyone. Suppose he did return
unexpectedly to consciousness, and found me there in the room, do you
think he'd be--annoyed?"

It was the sort of situation he liked, a part in the intimate affairs
of people of the first quality. "As to his being annoyed I can't say.
It might be the very opposite. What I know is this, that in the
coming back of the mind to its regular functions inhibitions are
often suspended----"

"And you mean by that----?"

"That the first few minutes in which the mind revives are likely to be
minutes of genuine reality. I don't say that the mind could keep it
up. Very few of us can be our genuine selves for more than flashes at
a time; but a returning consciousness doesn't put on its inhibitions
till----"

"So that what you see in those few minutes you can take as the
truth."

"I should say so. I'm not in a position to affirm it; but the
probabilities point that way."

"And if there had been, let us say, a lesser affection, something of
recent origin, and lower in every way----"

"I think that until it forged its influence again--if it ever
did--you'd see it forgotten or disowned."

She tried to be even more explicit. "He's perfectly free, in every
way. I broke off my engag