“By the way, what’s wrong with him, do you think?” Priam Farll inquired in his most boyish voice.

“Don’t know.  Chill!  He had a loud cardiac murmur.  Might be anything.  That’s why I said I’d call anyhow to-night.  Couldn’t come any sooner.  Been on my feet since six o’clock this morning.  You know what it is—­G.P.’s day.”

He smiled grimly in his fatigue.

“It’s very good of you to come,” said Priam Farll with warm, vivacious sympathy.  He had an astonishing gift for imaginatively putting himself in the place of other people.

“Not at all!” the doctor muttered.  He was quite touched.  To hide the fact that he was touched he struck a second match.  “Shall we go upstairs?”

In the bedroom a candle was burning on a dusty and empty dressing-table.  Dr. Cashmore moved it to the vicinity of the bed, which was like an oasis of decent arrangement in the desert of comfortless chamber; then he stooped to examine the sick valet.

“He’s shivering!” exclaimed the doctor softly.

Henry Leek’s skin was indeed bluish, though, besides blankets, there was a considerable apparatus of rugs on the bed, and the night was warm.  His ageing face (for he was the third man of fifty in that room) had an anxious look.  But he made no movement, uttered no word, at sight of the doctor; just stared, dully.  His own difficult breathing alone seemed to interest him.

“Any women up?”

The doctor turned suddenly and fiercely on Priam Farll, who started.

“There’s only ourselves in the house,” he replied.

A person less experienced than Dr. Cashmore in the secret strangenesses of genteel life in London might have been astonished by this information.  But Dr. Cashmore no more blenched now than he had blenched at the puce garment.

“Well, hurry up and get some hot water,” said he, in a tone dictatorial and savage.  “Quick, now!  And brandy!  And more blankets!  Now don’t stand there, please!  Here!  I’ll go with you to the kitchen.  Show me!” He snatched up the candle, and the expression of his features said, “I can see you’re no good in a crisis.”

“It’s all up with me, doctor,” came a faint whisper from the bed.

“So it is, my boy!” said the doctor under his breath as he tumbled downstairs in the wake of Priam Farll.  “Unless I get something hot into you!”

Master and Servant

“Will there have to be an inquest?” Priam Farll asked at 6 a.m.

He had collapsed in the hard chair on the ground-floor.  The indispensable Henry Leek was lost to him for ever.  He could not imagine what would happen to his existence in the future.  He could not conceive himself without Leek.  And, still worse, the immediate prospect of unknown horrors of publicity in connection with the death of Leek overwhelmed him.

“No!” said the doctor, cheerfully.  “Oh no!  I was present.  Acute double pneumonia!  Sometimes happens like that!  I can give a certificate.  But of course you will have to go to the registrar’s and register the death.”