“Just as they’ve been known to be run over by a taxi,” he said.

“Yes.  Well then, let’s try to be quite unemotional about this stranger called Marcella that we’re both keen about.  If she did happen to finish up—­out of sheer cussedness and desire to make a sensation, next week, you’d be the victim of a ghost, Louis!  I’d simply have to be back to see what you’re up to!  You know what a managing sort of person Marcella is, don’t you?”

He made a desperate effort to be unemotional, and presently he said, very decidedly: 

“I know now what I’m going to do, old girl!  I absolutely refuse to allow illness to go on!  There!  That’s a challenge to the Almighty, if He likes to take it—­”

She laughed gently, with tears in her eyes.

“I feel helpless.  And I’m fed up with feeling helpless.  That socialization of knowledge has got to begin, or I’ll—­Oh.  I don’t know!  Look at the idiocy of it!  Here we are in the twentieth century, and people are dying like flies all over the show.  Why, there’s no room for houses because there’s so much room needed for grave-yards!  And—­even if they don’t die, they’re ill, most of them.  And I’m not going to have it!”

“Louis!  What are you going to do?” she said, staring at him, taken out of her fear by his enthusiasm.  “I’ve never seen you like this before.”

“No.  I never have been.  But this business of illness has just come and touched me on the raw, you see!  You ought not to be ill.  It’s waste and lunacy to think of it.  And I—­ten years of my life wasted by a neurosis!  And your father, and Lord knows how many millions more!  I’ll tell you this much, Marcella!  Before five years have gone by I’ll be in the battlefield against illness, and I’ll be damned if illness won’t have to look out!  I loathe it, just as you do!  I resent it!  I’m going to stop it.  Listen, old girl, as soon as you’re out of that hospital, you’re off to England, and I’m going to the Pater, and I’m going on my knees to beg him to give me another go at the hospital.  I’ve got to get my tools ready, you know—­”

“Do you think your father will?”

“He’ll be sceptical.  I should if I were he.  I’ve been such a bounder to him in the past.  But if he’s too sceptical to help—­well, I’ll go to Buckingham Palace and ask King George to lend me the money!  I should think he’d be jolly glad to think there was a chance of wiping out illness for ever.”

Tears brimmed over:  it was when she saw the eternal child in Louis that she loved him most, and was most afraid for him; not afraid now that he would waste himself again, but afraid that he would never touch the mountain-tops at which he was aiming.

“Yes, we’ll go home,” she said dreamily.  “And I’ll take you on Lashnagar—­and we’ll see them all again.  I’ll ask Uncle to give us the money to take us home.  This wretched illness will take all we have.”

“Don’t you worry about your Uncle’s money,” he said grimly.  “I’ll see to that!  Marcella, there’s nothing I can’t do now.  If only I hadn’t monkeyed about at the hospital, probably I’d have had the knowledge to save you all this now.”