Satisfied, then, that he was on the highroad to recovery, and having made up her mind as to her own course of procedure, Nancy rather enjoyed these few days of comparative freedom.  She supplied herself with a huge box of bonbons, “Junie’s Love Test” and “The Widowed Bride,”—­books begun long ago, but wrested from her untimely by the ruthless Mrs. Baxter, on the score of takin’ her time off:  her rightful work for them that’d took her in, and fillin’ her red head with the foolishest sort o’ notions.  She had had so much to do that to have nothing to do but lie around in a red silk kimona and nibble chocolates and read love stories, seemed to her the supreme height of felicity.

She reveled in these novels.  They represented that something different toward which her untutored and stinted heart groped blindly.  Otherwise her mind, by no means a poor one, lay fallow and untilled.  The beauty and wonder of the world, the pity and terror of fate, the divine agony of love which sacrifices and endures, did not as yet exist for her.  She merely sensed that there was something different, somewhere—­maybe on the road ahead.  And so she wept over the woes of star-crost lovers, and sentimentalized over husky heroes utterly unlike any male beings known to nature, and believed she didn’t believe that disinterested and unselfish love existed in the world.  As she hadn’t the faintest gleam of self-knowledge, in all this she was perfectly sincere.

She did not see Mr. Champneys for two weeks or so.  In his nervous condition he evinced a singular reluctance to have her come near him, although others saw him daily.  For instance, Mr. Jason Vandervelde appeared at half after ten o’clock every morning during his client’s convalescence, was immediately admitted to Mr. Champney’s room, and left it upon the stroke of eleven.

Nancy watched this man curiously.  When he met her in the hall, he spoke to her in a nice, full-toned, modulated voice, exceedingly pleasing to the ear.  His eyes were small but of a deep and bright blue, and although he was heavily built he wore his clothes so well that he gave the effect of strength rather than of clumsiness.  He was clean-shaven and ruddy, and his large, well-shaped mouth was deeply curled at the corners.  His hands were not fat and white, as one might expect, but tanned and muscular, and slightly hairy.  His glasses gave him a certain precision, and his curled lips suggested irony.  Nancy liked to look at him.  He discomfited her understanding of men, for, she couldn’t tell why, she both liked and trusted him.  There was nothing romantic about him,—­a well-fed, well-groomed lawyer-man in his late thirties, with a handsome wife in a handsome house,—­yet he had the faculty of making her wonder about him, and wonder with kindness at that.  She wished she knew just how much he knew about her, her early upbringing, her sad lack of education.  What had Mr. Champneys told him?  Or had he really told him anything?