Di soothed him as best she could, took his tray from the nurse at the door, so that he might be spared as much as possible the sight of the most hideous woman in the world, rang for lights, and drew a curtain before the untactful rain, while he declaimed alternately on the enormity of Archie's behaviour, and on the callousness of Mrs. Courtenay in endeavouring to keep his daughter, his only daughter, away from him. Colonel Tempest and Archie detested Mrs. Courtenay. However much the father and son might disagree and bicker on most subjects, they could always sing a little duet together in perfect harmony about her. Colonel Tempest began a feeble solo on that theme to Di when he had finished with Archie; but Di visibly froze, and somehow the subject, often as it was started, always dropped. Di, as Colonel Tempest frequently informed her, did not care to hear the truth about her grandmother. If she knew all that _he_ did about her, and what her behaviour had been to _him_, she would not be so fond of her as she evidently was. Earlier in his illness Di had been obliged to exercise patience with her father, but she needed none now. That is the one small compensation for deep trouble. It numbs the power of feeling small irritations. It is when it begins to lift somewhat that the small irritations fit themselves out with new stings. Di had not reached that stage yet. The doctor who came daily to see her father looked narrowly at her, and ordered her to go out-of-doors as much as possible, in wet weather or fine. "I sometimes take a little nap after luncheon," said Colonel Tempest with dignity. "You might go out then, Di." "Miss Tempest will in any case go out morning and afternoon," said the doctor with decision. Colonel Tempest had before had his doubts whether the doctor understood his case, but now they were confirmed. He wished to change doctors, and a painful scene ensued between him and Di, in the course of which a hole was kicked in the _duvet_, and a cup of broth was upset. But it is an ascertained fact that women are not amenable to reason. Di sewed up the hole in the _duvet_, rubbed the carpet, and remained, as Colonel Tempest hysterically informed her, "as obstinate as her mother before her." On the second morning after her arrival at Brighton she was sitting with Colonel Tempest, reading the papers to him, when the waiter brought in the letters. There were none for her, two for her father. One was a foreign letter with a blue French stamp. She took them to him where he lay on the sofa. Colonel Tempest looked at them. "Nothing from Archie again," he said. "He does not care even to write and ask whether I am alive or dead." "Archie is not a good hand at writing," said Di, echoing, for the sake of saying something, the time-honoured masculine plea for exemption from the tedium of domestic correspondence. "This is John's hand," said Colonel Tempest. "A Paris postmark. How these rich men do rush about!"