"What?" said Mrs. Parsons. "Surely I didn't understand; you know I'm getting deaf as well as blind. Say the name again."
Isobel obeyed, still in a whisper.
"Him!" exclaimed the old woman, "him! Our Godfrey, and you've been and let on who you were--you who call yourself a nursing Commandant? Why, I dare say you'll be the death of him. Out you go, Miss, anyway; I'll take charge of this case for the present," and as it seemed to Godfrey, watching from the far corner, literally she bundled Isobel from the room.
Then she shut and locked the door. Coming to the bedside she knelt down rather stiffly, looked at him for a while to make sure, and kissed him, not once, but many times.
"So you have come back, my dear," she said, "and only half dead. Well, we won't have no young woman pushing between you and me just at present, Commandant or not. Time enough for love-making when you are stronger. Oh! and I never thought to see you again. There must be a good God somewhere after all, although He did make them Germans."
Then again she fell to kissing and blessing him, her hot tears dropping on his face and upsetting him ten times as much as Isobel had done.
Since in this topsy-turvy world often things work by contraries, oddly enough no harm came to Godfrey from these fierce excitements. Indeed he slept better than he had done since he found his mind again, and awoke, still weak of course, but without any temperature or pains in his head. Now it was that there began the most blissful period of all his life. Isobel, when she had recovered her balance, made him understand that he was a patient, and that exciting talk or acts must be avoided. He on his part fell in with her wishes, and indeed was well content to do so. For a while he wanted nothing more than just to lie there and watch her moving in and out of his room, with his food or flowers, or whatever it might be, for a burst of bad weather prevented him from going out of doors. Then, as he strengthened she began to talk to him (which Mrs. Parsons did long before that event), telling him all that for years he had longed to know; no, not all, but some things. Among other matters she described to him the details of her father's end, which occurred in a very characteristic fashion.
"You see, dear," she said, "as he grew older his passion for money-making increased more and more; why, I am sure I cannot say, seeing that Heaven knows he had enough."