Ridgeon.  Yes.

B. B. It’s an enormously interesting case.  You know, Colly, by Jupiter, if I didnt know as a matter of scientific fact that I’d been stimulating the phagocytes, I should say I’d been stimulating the other things.  What is the explanation of it, Sir Patrick?  How do you account for it, Ridgeon?  Have we over-stimulated the phagocytes?  Have they not only eaten up the bacilli, but attacked and destroyed the red corpuscles as well? a possibility suggested by the patient’s pallor.  Nay, have they finally begun to prey on the lungs themselves?  Or on one another?  I shall write a paper about this case.

Walpole comes back, very serious, even shocked.  He comes between B. B. and Ridgeon.

Walpole.  Whew!  B. B.:  youve done it this time.

B. B. What do you mean?

Walpole.  Killed him.  The worst case of neglected blood-poisoning I ever saw.  It’s too late now to do anything.  He’d die under the anaesthetic.

B. B. [offended] Killed!  Really, Walpole, if your monomania were not well known, I should take such an expession very seriously.

Sir Patrick.  Come come!  When youve both killed as many people as I have in my time youll feel humble enough about it.  Come and look at him, Colly.

Ridgeon and Sir Patrick go into the inner room.

Walpole.  I apologize, B. B. But it’s blood-poisoning.

B. B. [recovering his irresistible good nature] My dear Walpole, everything is blood-poisoning.  But upon my soul, I shall not use any of that stuff of Ridgeon’s again.  What made me so sensitive about what you said just now is that, strictly between ourselves, Ridgeon cooked our young friend’s goose.

Jennifer, worried and distressed, but always gentle, comes between them from the inner room.  She wears a nurse’s apron.

Mrs. Dubedat.  Sir Ralph:  what am I to do?  That man who insisted on seeing me, and sent in word that business was important to Louis, is a newspaper man.  A paragraph appeared in the paper this morning saying that Louis is seriously ill; and this man wants to interview him about it.  How can people be so brutally callous?

Walpole [moving vengefully towards the door] You just leave me to deal with him!

Mrs Dubedat [stopping him] But Louis insists on seeing him:  he almost began to cry about it.  And he says he cant bear his room any longer.  He says he wants to [she struggles with a sob]—­to die in his studio.  Sir Patrick says let him have his way:  it can do no harm.  What shall we do?

B B. [encouragingly] Why, follow Sir Patrick’s excellent advice, of course.  As he says, it can do him no harm; and it will no doubt do him good—­a great deal of good.  He will be much the better for it.

Mrs Dubedat [a little cheered] Will you bring the man up here, Mr Walpole, and tell him that he may see Louis, but that he mustnt exhaust him by talking? [Walpole nods and goes out by the outer door].  Sir Ralph, dont be angry with me; but Louis will die if he stays here.  I must take him to Cornwall.  He will recover there.