"Popped the lid on it, have you?" He nodded. "Got any money?" "In a bank." "All right. You'll want clothes and things. You can write. Only I want to know; it's nothing I shouldn't like? Is it?" "No." "I don't want you to tell me, but I wouldn't like to think you'd done something you'd be sorry for. . . . You haven't drunk your tea. I say, you haven't drunk your tea. Asleep. I'm off. Good night." And she limped away into the inner room. When he awoke the next day he remembered that she had come to him in the morning, shaken him out of his deep sleep, and made him understand that he could have her bed, sent him staggering toward it, and then, as he sank back into unconsciousness, he remembered hearing the door slam. She had laid breakfast for him, tea, bread and butter, and an egg lying ready to be boiled in a saucepan. He was at first petulant at her absence, but shook himself up enough to see that he was not in a position to feel any such thing, and to be amazed at his own acquiescence in the unexpected. It was somehow disreputable, this discovery of himself in a strange room after two nights spent in his clothes. He had not even removed his boots. His gratitude to Ann Pidduck was appreciably lessened as he remembered that she had not thought to take them off for him. To put a man in her bed with his boots on! That was, to say the least of it, distasteful. It was sufficiently against the grain of his physical and mental habits to send his thoughts flying back to the life he had left, but they were caught in the mists of the excitement and pain through which he had passed, and he relapsed into an insensate pondering, forgot his breakfast, his surroundings, and sat unheeding through the day, until Ann returned in the evening. She brought flowers. "Well, of all the----" she cried. "I did think you'd have cleared away. Why, you haven't touched your breakfast. Haven't you been out?" He had not exactly forgotten her. Indeed, he had been awaiting her coming, but now he was puzzled because her return was so expected, and it ought to have been unexpected. He felt injured, that he had been cheated, that things on this side of his crisis were too much like things on the other side: a woman, habit, meals, interest in his appetite. "Wake up, stoopid," said Ann. "You'll be wasting off like the niggers in Africa if you don't wake up. You can't go sleeping on forever." "Can't I?" "Well, you can, of course, but if you do, I'll be thinking you're a case. You're not a case, are you? You weren't last night." She spoke as though to be called a case was the horridest of insults, and he took it as such and roused himself not to deserve it. "That's better," she said. "Nothing to eat all day." "No. Nothing." She pondered that. "I expect your stomach knows best. Now, then, stir yourself. You got to write home."