“Lady Meadowcroft is quite right,” I said, hastily.  “I never thought about that.  There may be no plague, no patient at all.  I will go up with this man alone, Hilda, and find out the truth.  It will only take me five hours at most.  By noon I shall be back with you.”

“What?  And leave us here unprotected among the wild beasts and the savages?” Lady Meadowcroft cried, horrified.  “In the midst of the forest!  Dr. Cumberledge, how can you?”

“You are not unprotected,” I answered, soothing her.  “You have Hilda with you.  She is worth ten men.  And besides, our Nepaulese are fairly trustworthy.”

Hilda bore me out in my resolve.  She was too much of a nurse, and had imbibed too much of the true medical sentiment, to let me desert a man in peril of his life in a tropical jungle.  So, in spite of Lady Meadowcroft, I was soon winding my way up a steep mountain track, overgrown with creeping Indian weeds, on my road to the still problematical village graced by the residence of the retired gentleman.

After two hours’ hard climbing we reached it at last.  The retired gentleman led the way to a house in a street of the little wooden hamlet.  The door was low; I had to stoop to enter it.  I saw in a moment this was indeed no trick.  On a native bed, in a corner of the one room, a man lay desperately ill; a European, with white hair and with a skin well bronzed by exposure to the tropics.  Ominous dark spots beneath the epidermis showed the nature of the disease.  He tossed restlessly as he lay, but did not raise his fevered head or look at my conductor.  “Well, any news of Ram Das?” he asked at last, in a parched and feeble voice.  Parched and feeble as it was, I recognised it instantly.  The man on the bed was Sebastian—­no other!

“No news of Lam Das,” the retired gentleman replied, with an unexpected display of womanly tenderness.  “Lam Das clean gone; not come any more.  But I bling you back Eulopean doctor, sahib.”

Sebastian did not look up from his bed even then.  I could see he was more anxious about a message from his scout than about his own condition.  “The rascal!” he moaned, with his eyes closed tight.  “The rascal! he has betrayed me.”  And he tossed uneasily.

I looked at him and said nothing.  Then I seated myself on a low stool by the bedside and took his hand in mine to feel his pulse.  The wrist was thin and wasted.  The face, too, I noticed, had fallen away greatly.  It was clear that the malignant fever which accompanies the disease had wreaked its worst on him.  So weak and ill was he, indeed, that he let me hold his hand, with my fingers on his pulse, for half a minute or more without ever opening his eyes or displaying the slightest curiosity at my presence.  One might have thought that European doctors abounded in Nepaul, and that I had been attending him for a week, with “the mixture as before” at every visit.