It was out at last!  She had a feeling as if she had taken a cold plunge and had survived it!

“Glad?  What do you mean, Emily?”

“Every time I waked in the night, I thought of Jean and of how she would feel if Hilda went with you.  Do you realize that if she goes, there are things that the world will say?”

His face was stern.  “You are very brave to tell me that, Emily.”

“It had to be said, and last night I shirked it.”

“But Hilda is a very good nurse.”

“Do you think of her only as a—­good nurse?”

He turned that over in his mind.  “No.  In a sense she’s rather attractive.  She satisfies a certain side of me—.”

“The best side?”

He avoided an answer to that.  “When she is away I miss her.”

And now Miss Emily, shaking a little, but not showing it, made him face the situation squarely.

“Have you ever thought that, missing her, you might want to marry her?”

“I have thought of it.  Why not, Emily?”

“Have you thought that it would make her your Jean’s—­mother—?”

His startled look met her steadfast one.  His mind flew back to Hilda as she had bent down to him the night before, that he might unfasten the necklace.  He thought of the evil that her eyes saw in him, and in the rest of the world.  He thought of Jean, and of her white young dreams.

“No,” he said, as if to himself, “not that—­”

She laid her hand on his arm, “Go by yourself—­there’s a big work over there, and you can do it best—­alone.”

He looked down at her, smiling a little, but smiling sadly.  “If Jean’s mother had lived I should not have been such a weathercock.  Will you write to me—­promise me that you will write.”

“Of course,” cheerfully.  “Oh, by the way, Julia tells me that dinner will be at three, and that two soldier boys are coming.  I rather think I shall like that.”

He ran his fingers through his crinkled hair.  “What a lot you get out of life, Emily.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Little things count so much with you.  You are like Jean.  She is in seventh Heaven over a snowstorm—­or a chocolate soda.  It’s the youth in her—­and it’s the youth, too, in you—­”

She liked that, and flushed a little.  “Perhaps it is because there have been so few big things, Bruce, that the little ones look big.”

He had a fleeting sense of what Emily would be like with some big thing in her life—­how far would it swing her from her sedate course?

“You have done me a lot of good,” he said heartily when she left him to go upstairs to Jean.

Jean was still in bed.  “I must run down to the shop,” Emily informed her.  “But I’ll be back in plenty of time to dress for dinner.”

“Darling—­” Jean reminded her, “you must go to church.”

“Of course.  I shall stop on my way down.”