"Well, sir, we have done your commission."
Like the action of a wooden automaton, one short-fingered hand was pushed out toward the reading-desk. It seemed to point to the small phial that lay on the ledge of the rack; the phial he had carried in his pocket for months now as precaution in the event of an attack of angina. But Sir William's eyes were not on the phial. They were fixed on an open telegram.
And it was that telegram Sir William had sat reading. For how long?
The telegram regretted to inform him that his son, Captain Colin McIntyre, while bravely leading his battalion, had been killed in action.
Whatever it was she had heard or not heard from Germany, Nan presently unpacked her trunk and installed herself in a flat in Westminster, with a servant, two aged Belgian refugee women, and the grand-son of one of them, a little boy of five.
That for some time was the extent of Napier's knowledge of what was going on.
For the rest of that bewildering, tormenting autumn he had, with one or two exceptions, only fleeting and infrequent glimpses of the girl. And this in spite of the fact that she and Madge had set up an intimate friendship. Until a certain day in December, the two were often together both at the Lowndes Square house and at Nan's flat. The Belgian women, Napier gathered, were a sore trial. But that is another story.
Napier knew quite well he hadn't his lack of sympathy with her Belgian complications to thank for the sense of _gêne_, of being on new and uncertain ground in such encounters with Nan as the times permitted. Was it because she knew, and resented, his having prevented her going to Germany in Greta's wake? Or was it because some inkling had reached her as to the rifling of Greta's room at Lamborough? Madge couldn't have resisted the temptation to tell Nan the whole story by now. And why should Napier alone keep silence? Why, anyway, keep up this fiction of Greta's impeccability? "I'll have it out with Nan at the very first opportunity!"
Napier was almost happy, for a time, anticipating his first opportunity.
It came after a highly uncomfortable luncheon at Lowndes Square, the occasion of Julian's last appearance in that house where, ever since boyhood, he had been so welcome.