“Hey!” said Edward in a thick desperate voice. A week before he would have refused to believe that the sight of Banner Hope could ever give him pleasure. “Why, why, why....” said Mr. Hope, turning round guiltily. Edward saw at once that the visitor had been glad to find the patient asleep. It had been to Mr. Hope an opportunity to acquire merit as a benevolent friend without the effort of expressing benevolence. “Why, why, why ... isn’t this just too bad?...” He looked inquisitively at Edward’s miserable face. “Now, don’t you say a thing, Edward. The nurse has told me how it is. You gotter lie low and say nothing and I’ll give you noos of all the folks. All your friends surely are peeved with these old sawbones for carving you about this way. I should say so. Yes, indeed.” This unprecedented burst of sympathy at once restored to Edward a pale gleam of the melancholy heroic light in which it was his constant effort to see himself. Still the name of Emily had not yet been mentioned and he tried to point this out. But his throat still played him false. “Eb-gy....” “That’s all right. That’s all right. I get you perfectly. You gotter let uncle do all the tongue work. Let me see now.... Well, there’s Melsie Stone Ponting. She’s a sport now.... What d’you guess she said when she knew you were sick? Why, she said—well, mebbe I’d better not tell you after all.... Anyway it was very smart and showed how crazy she was about you. Avery Bird I haven’t seen recently, he naturally can’t think of a thing except Rhoda’s indictment. I guess you’ve heard how Rhoda was arrested the day we all got home from Yosemite. Indicted for what they call Criminal Syndicalism. Some of the dope she put across at the W. I. L. A. kinda got somebody’s goat. You know, when we’d left you at the hospital some of us went round for a drink at Rhoda’s studio. There’s a kind of an old she-janitor, you know, located in the basement, and she met us and said how the cops had been and opened Rhoda’s bureau and gotten a wad of papers out of it. Rhoda surely was mad, and Avery—who almost never lets up on his detached pose or says anything except epigrams—I’ll say he blasphemed quite a bit. And right there in the middle of that little tableau two plain-clothes cops walked in. The door was still open and they walked in and there was Rhoda up to her elbows in her bureau, trying to find out which papers they’d gotten hold of. Well, it was a fair cinch. There was no getting around it. One of the cops read the warrant; it was all about sabbotidge and advocating unlawful methods of effecting political changes. They seemed to know a whole heap about sister Rhoda. She didn’t answer back any. She smiled and looked white. Avery said a hell of a lot, but they didn’t take much account of him. They took all our names and addresses. Of course, it’s a long ways from indictment to conviction. Avery says he’s not taking much on her chances, she’s got in good and deep.