A chesterfield couch had been pulled well into the bay window of one of Kitty's big rooms so that Nan, from the nest of cushions amid which she lay, could see all that was passing in the street below. The warm May sunshine poured into the room, revealing with painful clarity the changes which the last three months had wrought in her. Never at any time robust in appearance, she seemed the slenderest, frailest thing as she lay there, the delicate angles of her face sharpened by fever and weakness, her cheeks so hollowed that the violet-blue eyes looked almost amazingly big and wide-open in her small face. Kitty was sitting near her, a half-knitted jumper lying across her knees, the inevitable cigarette in her hand, while Barry, who had returned from Cannes some weeks ago--entirely unperturbed at finding his new system a complete "wash-out"--leaned, big and debonair, against the window. "When are we going to Mallow?" asked Nan fretfully. "I'm so tired of staring at those houses across the way." Barry turned his head and regarded the houses opposite reflectively. "They're not inspiring, I admit," he answered, "even though many of them _are_ the London habitations of belted earls and marquises." "We'll go to Mallow as soon as you like," interposed Kitty. "I think you're quite fit to stand the journey now." "Fit? Of course I'm fit. Only"--Nan's face clouded--"it will mean your leaving town just when the season's in full swing. I shan't like dragging you away." "Season?" scoffed Kitty. "Season be blowed! The only thing that matters is whether you're strong enough to travel." She regarded Nan affectionately. The latter had no idea how dangerously ill she had been. She remembered Roger's visit to the flat perfectly clearly. But everything which followed had been more or less a blank, with blurred intervals of doubtful clarity, until one day she found herself lying in a bed with Kitty standing at its foot and Peter sitting beside it. She recollected quite well observing: "Why, Peter, you've got some grey hairs! I never noticed them before." Peter had laughed and made some silly reply about old age creeping on, and presently it seemed to her that Kitty, crying blindly, had led him out of the room while she herself was taken charge of by a cheerful, smiling person in a starched frock, whose pretty, curling hair insisted on escaping from beneath the white cap which coifed it. Unknown to Nan, those were the first rational words she had spoken since the night on which she had fainted, after refusing to return to Trenby Hall with Roger. Moved by some inexplicable premonition of impending illness, Kitty had insisted on driving her, carefully pillowed and swaddled in rugs, to her house in Green Street that same evening. "If she's going to be ill," she remarked practically, "it will be much easier to nurse her at my place than at the flat."