So, with the consideration of his kind, he was so good as to keep out of it, while Colonel Tempest wept salt tears into his already too salt beef-tea (it was always too salt or not salt enough), and remarked with bitterness that he could have fancied a sardine, and that other people's sons nursed their parents when they were at death's door. Young Grandcourt had never left _his_ father's bedside for three weeks when he had pneumonia; but Archie, it seemed, was different. "My children are not much comfort to me," he told the doctor as regularly as he put out his tongue. "John might have come," he said one day to Di. "He got out of it by sending a cheque, but I think he might have taken the trouble just to come and see whether I was alive or dead." "John is ill himself," said Di. "John is always ill," said Colonel Tempest, fretfully, with the half-memory of convalescence--"always ailing and coddling himself; and yet he has twice my physique. John grows coarse-looking--very coarse. I fancy he is a large eater. I remember he was ill in the summer. I went to see him. I was always sitting with him; and there did not seem to be much the matter with him. I think he gives way." "Perhaps it is a family failing," said Di, who was beginning to discover what a continual bottling up and corking down of effervescent irritation is comprised under the name of patience. How many weeks was it after Di's return to London when a cloud no larger than a man's hand arose on the clear horizon of that secret happiness which no amount of querulousness on Colonel Tempest's part could effectually dim? It was a very small cloud. It took the shape of a card with John's name on it, who had come to Brook Street to inquire after his uncle. "He is in London. He will call this afternoon," said Di to herself; and as Colonel Tempest happened to be too sleepy to wish to be read to, she left him early in the afternoon, and hurried home. And she and Mrs. Courtenay sat indoors all that afternoon, though they had been lent a carriage, and they waited to make tea till after the time; and whenever the door bell rang, Mrs. Courtenay's hands shook quite as much as Di's. And aimless, foolish persons called, but John did not call. "He is ill," said Mrs. Courtenay in the dusk, "or he has been prevented coming. There is some reason. He will write." "Yes," said Di, "he will come when he can." But nevertheless a little shiver of doubt crept into her heart for the first time. "If I had been in his place," she said to herself, "I should have come ill or well, and I should _not_ have been prevented." She put the thought aside instantly as unreasonable, but the shy dread she had previously felt of meeting him changed to a restless longing just to see him, just to be reassured. To be loved by one we love is, after all, so incredible a revelation that it is not wonderful that human nature seeks after a sign. Only a great self-esteem finds love easy to believe in.