Rainham shook his head again.

“I’m afraid not.  You don’t know my doctor.  He wouldn’t hear of it.  No, you won’t see me in town again before May, unless there’s a radical reform in the climate.”

“Couldn’t—­couldn’t we put it off till May?” suggested Eve naively.

But the suggestion was not received with anything approaching enthusiasm.

“Good-bye, Philip,” said Eve again, when her lover was handing Mrs. Sylvester into the little brougham.  “Mind you take great care of yourself.”

Rainham returned the frank pressure of her hand.

“Good-bye,” he said.

CHAPTER XVI

After all, Philip Rainham loitered on his way South.  He spent a week in Paris, and passing on by way of the Mont Cenis, lingered in Turin, a city with a treacherous climate and ugly rectangular streets, which he detested, out of sheer idleness, for three days.  On the fourth, waking to find winter upon him suddenly, and the ground already dazzling from a night’s snow, he was seized with panic—­an ancient horror of falling ill in strange places returning to him with fresh force, as he felt already the chill of the bleak plains of Piedmont in his bones.  It sent him hurrying to his destination, Bordighera, by the first train; and it was not too soon:  the misused lung asserted itself in a haemorrhage, and by the time he reached the fair little town running out so coquettishly, amid its olive yards and palm-trees, into the blue Mediterranean, he was in no proper temper to soliloquize on its charms.

The doctor had a willing slave in him for three weeks; then he revolted, and found himself sufficiently cured to sit when the sun shone—­and sometimes when it did not—­covered in a gray shawl, smoking innumerable cigarettes on a green, blistered seat in the garden of his hotel.  He replied to the remonstrating that he had been ill before this bout, and would surely be ill again, but that temporarily he was a well man.  It was only when he was alone that he could afford to admit how savage a reminder of his disabilities he had received.  And, indeed, his days of captivity had left their mark on him—­the increased gauntness of his figure apart—­in a certain irritation and nerve distress, which inclined him for once to regret the multitude of acquaintance that his long habit of sojourning there had obtained.  The clatter of English tongues at table d’hote began to weary him; the heated controversy which waged over the gambling-tables of the little principality across the bay left him arid and tired; and the gossip of the place struck him as even more tedious and unprofitable than of old.  He could no longer feign a decent interest in the flirtations of the three Miss Smiths, as they were recounted to him nightly by Mrs. Engel, the sympathetic widow who sat next to him, and whose sympathy he began, in the enlightenment of his indisposition, to distrust.