Dawn was creeping in at the windows—­a grey city dawn, filled with soot and the rumbling of early wagons.  A smell of damp asphalt from the courtyard floated in and a dirty sparrow chirped on the sill where the Nurse had been in the habit of leaving crumbs.  Billy Grant, very sleepy and contented now that he had got his way, dictated a line or two on a blank symptom record, and signed his will in a sprawling hand.

“If only,” he muttered, “I could see Lin’s face when that’s—­sprung on him!”

The minister picked up the Bible from the tumbled bed and opened it.

“Perhaps,” he suggested very softly, “if I read from the Word of God——­”

Satisfied now that he had fooled the Lindley Grants out of their very shoebuttons, Billy Grant was asleep—­asleep with the thermometer under his arm and with his chest rising and falling peacefully.

The minister looked across at the Nurse, who was still holding the thermometer in place.  She had buried her face in the white counterpane.

“You are a good woman, sister,” he said softly.  “The boy is happier, and you are none the worse.  Shall I keep the paper for you?”

But the Nurse, worn out with the long night, slept where she knelt.  The minister, who had come across the street in a ragged smoking-coat and no collar, creaked round the bed and threw the edge of the blanket over her shoulders.

Then, turning his coat collar up over his unshaved neck, he departed for the mission across the street, where one of his derelicts, in his shirtsleeves, was sweeping the pavement.  There, mindful of the fact that he had come from the contagious pavilion, the minister brushed his shabby smoking-coat with a whiskbroom to remove the germs!

III

Billy Grant, of course, did not die.  This was perhaps because only the good die young.  And Billy Grant’s creed had been the honour of a gentleman rather than the Mosaic Law.  There was, therefore, no particular violence done to his code when his last thoughts—­or what appeared to be his last thoughts—­were revenge instead of salvation.

The fact was, Billy Grant had a real reason for hating the Lindley Grants.  When a fellow like that has all the Van Kleek money and a hereditary thirst, he is bound to drink.  The Lindley Grants did not understand this and made themselves obnoxious by calling him “Poor Billy!” and not having wine when he came to dinner.  That, however, was not his reason for hating them.

Billy Grant fell in love.  To give the devil his due, he promptly set about reforming himself.  He took about half as many whisky-and-sodas as he had been in the habit of doing, and cut out champagne altogether.  He took up golf to fill in the time, too, but gave it up when he found it made him thirstier than ever.  And then, with things so shaping up that he could rise in the morning without having a drink to get up on, the Lindley Grants thought it best to warn the girl’s family before it was too late.