“But, Doctor,” interrupted Larry, bewildered, and dismayed, “You—­I thought you had advised Barty—­”

The Big Doctor frowned at him, and winked too, while he laid his huge white hand on his watch-pocket, tapping with his middle finger on the spot which, as he knew, the average layman dedicated to the heart.  He trusted to Larry’s quickness, and did not trust in vain.

“A sort of heart attack,” Aunt Freddy had said.

“I’m most frightfully sorry, Cousin Dick,” Larry began, hurriedly, before a worse thing happened.  “Somehow, I never thought—­you see I was out of the country—­it seemed to me that—­” he was going to repeat those comforting sedatives about leaving the man at the helm to bark for you—­(Heavens!  He had been on the point of saying that!  Was he going to laugh?)—­but he couldn’t give Barty away.  He rushed into apology, regret, abuse of his own ignorance, and imbecility, and the Big Doctor, at each pause in the penitence, poured a little oil and wine into the wounds for which Larry and the Carmodys were jointly responsible, and Dick’s anger, like the red that had flared to his face, fell like a spent flame.

“Say no more, boy, say no more,” he said, dropping into the chair from which he had leaped in the course of his apologia pro vita sua; “I daresay you knew no better—­anyhow, you didn’t mean to do me a bad turn—­”

Larry took his hand.  “You know that, Cousin Dick,” he said, in profound distress.  “Of all people in the world—­the very last.  If there was anything I could do now—­”

“Well now, I’ll tell you what you could do!” cut in Dr. Mangan, jovially, “you could tell our friend Evans to bring in the Major’s tumbler of hot milk and whisky, and to look sharp about it too!  I ordered he was to have it at six o’clock—­”

He looked hard at Larry, who realised that his disturbing presence was to be removed, and forthwith removed it.

He delivered his message, and strayed back to the big, empty hall.  A sense of aloofness, of having no place nor part in this well-remembered house, was on him.  None of them wanted him; he could see that easily enough, and he had done Cousin Dick a bad turn.  He had said so.  If it came to that, he supposed he had done Christian a bad turn, too—­Christian and Cousin Dick, the only two of the whole crowd who had been really glad to see him.  He thought of her face as she came riding through the dusky wood to meet him.  “The dawn was in it!” he said to himself; again he saw it, lit with the light that the hunt had kindled; and then he thought of her stricken eyes, as she looked from one man to another, asking for the hope that they had to refuse her.  It had been all his fault, or—­here the inner apologist, that is always quick to console, interposed—­not quite exactly his fault.  How was he to have known?  A remembrance of Cousin Dick’s undeciphered letters came to him; even the inner apologist hung his head.  In any case—­Larry’s active mind resumed its deliberations—­it was quite clearly his business to find Christian and to explain to her, as far as was possible, how things stood.