“No.”

“Or because you cared a snap for me.”  This was affirmation, not question.

“No, not that, though I——­”

She gave a hopeless little gesture of despair.

“Then—­why?  Why?”

“For one of the meanest reasons I know—­to be even with some people who had treated me badly.”

The thing was easier now.  His flat denial of any sentimental reason had helped to make it so.

“A girl that you cared about?”

“Partly that.  The girl was a poor thing.  She didn’t care enough to be hurt by anything I did.  But the people who made the trouble——­”

Now a curious thing happened.  Billy Grant found at this moment that he no longer hated the Lindley Grants.  The discovery left him speechless—­that he who had taken his hate into the very valley of death with him should now find himself thinking of both Lindley and his wife with nothing more bitter than contempt shocked him.  A state of affairs existed for which his hatred of the Lindley Grants was alone responsible; now the hate was gone and the state of affairs persisted.

“I should like,” said Billy Grant presently, “to tell you a little—­if it will not bore you—­about myself and the things I have done that I shouldn’t, and about the girl.  And of course, you know, I’m—­I’m not going to hold you to—­to the thing I forced you into.  There are ways to fix that.”

Before she would listen, however, she must take his temperature and give him his medicine, and see that he drank his buttermilk—­the buttermilk last, so as not to chill his mouth for the thermometer.  The tired lines had gone from under her eyes and she was very lovely that day.  She had always been lovely, even when the Staff Doctor had slapped her between the shoulders long ago—­you know about that—­only Billy Grant had never noticed it; but to-day, sitting there with the thermometer in his mouth while she counted his respirations, pretending to be looking out the window while she did it, Billy Grant saw how sweet and lovely and in every way adorable she was, in spite of the sad droop of her lips—­and found it hard to say the thing he felt he must.

“After all,” he remarked round the thermometer, “the thing is not irrevocable.  I can fix it up so that——­”

“Keep your lips closed about the thermometer!” she said sternly, and snapped her watch shut.

The pulse and so on having been recorded, and “Very hungry” put down under Symptoms, she came back to her chair by the window, facing him.  She sat down primly and smoothed her white apron in her lap.

“Now!” she said.

“I am to go on?”

“Yes, please.”

“If you are going to change the pillows or the screen, or give me any other diabolical truck to swallow,” he said somewhat peevishly, “will you get it over now, so we can have five unprofessional minutes?”

“Certainly,” she said; and bringing an extra blanket she spread it, to his disgust, over his knees.