Life resumed itself next day as if there had been no dramatic interlude. Proud of the scrap, as he named it, which had taken place in his room, Guy made the best of it for all concerned. His version was tactful, hurting nobody's feelings. The trick on the old man was a merry one, and after a fight about its humor Tad Whitelaw and the Whitelaw Baby had run off together to let the old fellow out. Spit Castle's tapir nose had got badly hurt in the scrimmage, and bled all over the sofa. The splash of ink on the wall was further evidence that Guy's room was a rendezvous of sports. But sports being sports the honors had been even on the whole, and no hard feeling left behind. Tad and the Whitelaw Baby would now, Guy predicted, be better friends.
But of that there was no sign. There was no sign of anything at all. When the Whitelaw Baby met the Whitelaw Baby's brother they passed in exactly the same way as heretofore. You would not have said that the one was any more conscious of the other than two strangers who pass in Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue. In Tad there was no show of resentment; in Tom there was none of pride. As far as Tom was concerned, there was only a humiliated sense of regret.
And then, in April, life again took another turn. Coming back one day to his rooms, Tom found a
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 message requesting him to call a number which he knew to be Mrs. Danker's. His first thought was of Maisie, with whom his letters had begun to be infrequent. Mrs. Danker told him, however, that Honey had had an accident. It was a bad accident, how bad she didn't know. Giving him the name of the hospital to which he had been taken, she begged him to go to him at once. After all the years they had lived with Mrs. Danker she considered them almost as relatives.
The hospital, near the foot of Grove Street, preserved the air of the sedate old Boston of the middle nineteenth century. Its low dome, its pillared façade, its grounds, its fine old trees, had been familiar to Tom ever since he had lived on Beacon Hill. In less than an hour after ringing up Mrs. Danker he was in the office asking for news.
News was scanty. Expecting everyone to understand what he meant to Honey and Honey meant to him, he had looked for the reception which friends in trouble and excitement give to the friend who brings his anxiety to mix with theirs. It would be, "Oh, come in. Poor fellow, he's suffering terribly. It happened thus and so." But to the interne in the office, a young man wearing a white jacket, Honey was not so much as a name. His case was but one among other cases. A good many came in a day. In a week, or a month, or a year, there was no keeping account of them, except as they were registered. Individual suffering was lost sight of in the immense amount of it. But the interne was polite, and said that if Tom would sit down he would find out.
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Among the hardest minutes Tom had ever gone through were those in the little reception room. Not only was there suspense; there was remorse. He had treated Honey like a cad. He had never been decent to him. He had never really been grateful. There had never been a minute, in the whole of the nearly six years they had lived together, in which he had not been sorry, either consciously or subconsciously, at being mixed up with an ex-convict. It was the ex-convict he had always seen before he had seen the friend.
A second interne wearing a white jacket came to question him, to ask him who he was, and the nature of his business with the patient. If he was only a friend he could hardly expect to see him. The man was under opiates, he needed to be kept quiet.
"What's happened? What's the matter with him? I can't find out."
The interne didn't know exactly. He had been crushed. He was injured internally. The cause of the accident he hadn't heard.
"Could I see his nurse?"
There was more difficulty about that, but in the end he was taken upstairs, where the nurse came out to the corridor to speak to him. She was a competent, businesslike woman, with none of the emotion at contact with pain which Tom thought must be part of a nurse's equipment. But she could tell him nothing definite. Not having been on duty when the case had been brought in, she had heard no more than the facts essential to what she had to do.
"Do you think he'll die?"
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"You'd have to ask the doctor that. He's not dead now. That's about as much as I can say." At sight of the big handsome fellow's distress she partly relented. "You may come in and look at him. You mustn't try to speak to him."
He followed her into a long ward, with an odor of disinfectant. White beds, mostly occupied, lined each wall. Here and there was one surrounded by a set of screens, partially secluding a sufferer. At one such set they stopped. Through an opening between two screens Tom was allowed to look at Honey who lay with face upturned, and no sign of pain on the features. He slept as Tom had seen him sleep hundreds of times when he expected to get up again next morning. The difference was in the expectation of getting up. Blinded by tears, Tom tiptoed away.
When he came next day the effect of the opiate had worn off, and yet not wholly. Honey turned his head at his approach and smiled. Sitting beside the bed, Tom took the big, calloused hand lying outside the coverlet, and held it in his own relatively tender one. More than ever it was borne in on him at whose cost that tenderness had been maintained. Honey liked to have his hand held. A part of the wall of aloofness with which he had kept himself surrounded seemed to have broken down.
A little incoherently he told what had happened. He had been stowing packing-cases in the hold of a big ship. The packing-cases were lowered by a crane. The crane as a rule was a good old thing, slow paced, gentle, safe. But this time something seemed to have gone wrong with her. Though his
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 back was turned, Honey knew by the shadow above him that she was at her work. When he had got into its niche the case with which he was busy he would swing round and seize the new one. And then he heard a shout. It was a shout from the dock, and didn't disturb him. He was about to turn when something fell. It struck him in the back. It was all he knew. He thought he remembered the blow, but was not certain whether he did or not. When he "came to" he had already been moved to the shed, and was waiting for the ambulance. He seemed not to have a body any more. He was only a head, like one of them there angels in a picture, with wings beneath their chins.
He laughed at that, and with the laugh the nurse took Tom away; but when he came back on the following day Honey's mind was clearer.
"I've made me will long ago," he said, when Tom had given him such bits of news as he asked for. "It's all legal and reg'lar. Had a lawyer fix it up. Never told yer nothink about it. Everythink left to you."
"Oh, Honey, don't let us talk about that. You'll be up and around in a week or so."
"Sure I'll be up and around. Yer don't think a little thing like this is goin' to bust me. Why, I don't feel 'ardly nothink, not below the neck. All the same, it can't do no harm for you to know what's likely to be what. If I was to croak, which I don't intend to, yer'd have about sixteen hundred dollars what I've saved to finish yer eddication on. The will is in the bottom of me trunk at Danker's."
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On another day he said, "If anyone was to pop up and say I owed 'em that money, because I took it from 'em...."
He held the sentence there, leaving Tom to wonder if he had thoughts of restitution, or possibly of repentance.
"I don't owe 'em nothink," he ended. "Belonged to me just as much as it belonged to them. Nothink don't belong to nobody. I never was able to figger it out just the way I wanted to, because I ain't never had no eddication; but Gord's lor ............