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." Results had justified her.

During the attack of brain fever which followed, it had required all the skill of doctors and nurses to hold Nan back from the gates of death.

The fever burnt up her strength like a fire, and at first it had seemed as though nothing could check the delirium.