momentarily more conscious, also, that the iron—­of the hard cold slats composing the seat of his garden chair—­if not entering into his soul, was actively entering a less august and more material portion of his being through the slack of his thin evening trousers.  He endured both tedium and bodily suffering with the fortitude of a saint and martyr; but next morning revealed him victim of a violent chill demanding medical aid.

The native local practitioner was reported mono-lingual, and of small scientific reputation; while our General though fluent in vituperative Hindustani, and fairly articulate in Arabic, could lay no claim to proficiency in the French language.  Hence probable deadlock between doctor and patient.  Henrietta acted promptly, foreseeing danger of jaundice or worse; and bade Marshall Wace telegraph to Cannes for an English physician.  As a nurse she was capable if somewhat unsympathetic—­illness and death being foreign to her personal programme.  She attended upon her small sick warrior assiduously; thereby earning the admiration of the outsiders, and abject apologies for “being such a confounded nuisance to you, my love,” from himself.  Her maid, a Eurasian—­by name Serafina Lousada, whom she had brought with her from Bombay a couple of years earlier, prematurely-wrinkled of skin and shrunken of figure, yet whose lustrous black eyes still held the embers of licentious fires—­would readily have shared her labours.  But Henrietta was at some trouble to eliminate Serafina from the sick-chamber, holding her tendencies suspect as insidiously and quite superfluously sentimental, where any male creature might be concerned.

Carteret and Sir Charles Verity, on the other hand, she encouraged with the sweetest dignity imaginable, to take turns at the bedside—­and to look in upon her drawing-room, also, on their way back and forth thither.  A common object and that a philanthropic one, gives unimpeachable occasions of intimacy.  These Henrietta did not neglect, though touching them with a disarming pensiveness of demeanour.  The invalid was, “the thing “—­the thought of him wholly paramount with her.  Her anxiety might be lightened, perhaps, but by no means deleted, by the attentions of these friends of former years.—­A pretty enough play throughout, as the two gentlemen silently noted, the one with kindly, the other with sardonic, humour.

Her henchman, Marshall Wace, meanwhile, Henrietta kept on the run until the triangular patch of colour, straining either prominent cheek-bone, was more than ever accentuated.  There was method, we may however take it, in the direction of these apparently mad runnings, since they so incessantly landed the runner in the salon of the Grand Hotel crowning the wooded headland.  Damaris she refused to have with her.  No—­she couldn’t consent to any clouding of the darling child’s bright spirit by her private worries.  Trouble, heaven knows, is bound to overtake each one of us more than soon enough!  She—­Henrietta—­could endure her allotted portion of universal tribulation best in the absence of youthful witnesses.