It was not until the next afternoon that Peter was allowed to get up. His superb constitution had stood, rock-like, against the chill which the doctor's medicine had helped to throw off. He had done full justice to a broiled chicken which Nellie Pope had cooked for him; but when, having put on his clothes, he stood in front of the looking-glass, he felt as though he had been under a steam-roller and flattened out. "Good Lord!" he said, when he saw his pale, unshaven face. "Good Lord!" But he was very happy. He had read and re-read Ranken Townsend's generous apology. Betty was waiting for him--thank God for that. And then he began to look round. Was this a nursing home? The dressing-table, with its tins of powder and a large dilapidated puff, its red stuff for lips, its shabby little brushes and a comb with several of its teeth gone, looked as though it belonged to a woman,--poor and struggling. The door of the closet, which gaped a little, showed dresses hanging and a pair of very high-heeled boots with white uppers. He opened a drawer in the dressing-table. It was full of soiled white gloves, several veils neatly rolled up, and a collection of small handkerchiefs. A strong, pungent scent rose up from them. An ugly suspicion crept slowly into his mind. He looked at the bed with its frilled pillows, at the flower papered bare walls, at the rather worn blue carpet, at the flimsy wrap hanging limply on a peg on the door of the bath-room, at the little bed-room slippers tucked away beneath one of the white, painted chairs---- He turned and called out: "Nurse! Nurse!" Something in his tone brought Nellie Pope in quickly. He was standing with his hand on the big brass knob of the bed. "You told me that this was a nursing home," he said. The girl laughed. How should she know what Peter had done with his life--of the ideal that he kept so steadily in front of him? She only knew the other kind of men. "So it is," she said. "It's _my_ home and I've had to be your nurse. Pretty well put, I think. Don't you? 'Ow d'you feel, dearie? A bit groggy on your pins?" The girl's cockney accent, her made-up face, her cheap, smart clothes were noticed by him for the first time. Her insinuating, cheerful manner and that sort of hail-fellow-well-met intimacy that was all about her, came to him with a new and appalling meaning. He had been spoken to by just such women in London after dark, and on Broadway and its side streets as he passed. They belonged to the night life of all great cities. They were the moths who came out attracted by the glare of electric light. Good God! What was he doing in that place?