Why should she go, and leave the road clear for Peter Champneys?  It occurred to her that, seen from his point of view, her elimination from the scene might be regarded somewhat in the light of providential interference in his behalf.  She flushed.  It wasn’t fair!  The thought of Peter Champneys was gall and wormwood to her.

Nancy wasn’t a fool.  Her honesty had a blunt directness, a sort of cave-woman frankness.  In her, truthfulness was not so much a virtue as an energy.  The hardness of her unloved life had bred a like hardness in her sense of values; she was distrustful and suspicious because she had never had occasion to be anything else.  In that suspicion and distrustfulness had lain her safety.  She had no sense of spiritual values as yet.  Religion had meant going to church on Sundays when you had clean clothes in which to appear.  Morals had meant being good, and to Nancy being good simply meant not being bad—­and you couldn’t be bad, go wrong, if you never trusted any man.  A girl that trusted none of ’em could keep respectable.  Nancy had seen girls who trusted men, in her time.  Nothing like that for her!  But she knew, also, the price the woman pays whether she trusts or distrusts, and the matrimony which at times rewarded the distrustful didn’t appear much more alluring than the potter’s field which waited for the credulous.  Anyway you looked at it, what happened wasn’t pleasant.  And it was worse yet when you knew there was something better and different.  You had to pay a price to get that something better and different, of course.  The fact that one pays for everything one gets was coming home to Nancy with increasing force; the problem, then, was to get your money’s worth.

She took her head in her hands, and tried to concentrate all her faculties.  She wasn’t a shirker, and she realized that she must decide upon her course of conduct now and stick to it.  If she didn’t look out for herself, who would?  And presently she had reached the conclusion that when Mr. Peter Champneys reappeared upon the scene, he must find Mrs. Peter Champneys occupying the foreground, and occupying it creditably, too.  She’d do it!  When Mr. Chadwick Champneys recovered, she’d come to terms with him.  She’d keep faith.

She spent three or four anxious days, while specialists came and went, and white-capped, starched, authoritative personages relieved each other in the sick-room, their answers to all queries being that the patient was doing quite as well as could be expected.  At the end of the fifth day they admitted that the patient was recovering,—­was, in fact, out of danger, though he wouldn’t leave his room for another week or ten days; and he wasn’t to be worried or disturbed about anything.