Seeing how mortally weak she was, Vandervelde took his departure, promising to see her again.  He had a further interview with the house-physician and the head nurse.  Whatever could be done for her would be done, but they had handled too many Gracies to be optimistic about this particular one.  They knew how quickly these gutter-candles flicker out.

Commonplace as the girl was, she managed to win Vandervelde’s interest and sympathy.  That she had won young Peter Champneys’s didn’t surprise him.  He was glad that she had had that one disinterested and kindly deed to look back to.  The boy’s quixotic behavior brought a smile to the lawyer’s lips.  Fancy his wishing to send such a girl to his uncle and being sure that old Chadwick wouldn’t misunderstand!  Gracie cast a new light upon Peter Champneys, and a very likable one.  Vandervelde had seen in the uncle something of that same unworldliness that the nephew displayed, and it had established the human equation between Peter and the shrewd old man.

Busy as he was, he managed to see Gracie again.  She had refused to be put into a private room; she preferred the ward.

“It’s not fittin’,” she said.  “Anyhow, I don’t want to stay by myself.  When I wake up at night I want to feel people around me,—­even sick people’s better than nobody.  It’s sort o’ comfortin’ to have comp’ny,” and she stayed in the ward, sharing with less fortunate ones the fruit and flowers Vandervelde had sent to her.  Once the gripping fear that had obsessed her had been dispelled, once she was sure of a protecting kindness that might be relied upon, she proved a gay little body.  As the blonde person said, Gracie wasn’t a bad sort at all.  As a matter of fact, neither was the blonde person.  Vandervelde saw that, and it troubled his complacent satisfaction with things.  He saw in the waste of these women an effect of that fatally unmoral energy ironically called modern civilization.  He wondered how Marcia, or Peter’s wife, would react to Gracie.  Should he tell them about her?  N-no, he rather thought not.

Marcia had cabled that she and Anne were leaving Italy—­were, in fact, on their way home.  During his wife’s absence he had had to make two or three South American trips, to safeguard certain valuable Champneys interests.  The trips had been highly successful and interesting, and he hadn’t disliked them, but Vandervelde was incurably domestic; he liked Marcia at the household helm.

“I wanted to hire half a dozen brass-bands to meet you,” he told his wife the morning of her arrival, and kissed her brazenly.  “Marcia, you are prettier than ever!  As for Anne—­” At sight of Anne Champneys his eyes widened.

“Why, Anne!—­Why Anne!” He took off his glasses, polished them, and stared at his ward.  Marcia smiled the pleased smile of the artist whose work is being appreciated by a competent critic.  She was immensely proud of the tall fair girl, so poised, so serene, so decorative.