he
firelight still in her face, held out a small gloved hand with a
smiling "Au revoir, Philip," he shook his head rather sadly.

"I'm afraid it must be good-bye--for some time, at least. I came to
tell you that I am on the wing again. Doctor's orders, you know. I
shall be in Bordighera on Friday, I expect."

"And to-day's Tuesday," complained Eve.

"And I was just going to ask you to dine with us, one day soon,"
expostulated her mother.

"You must come over at Christmas, old man," said Dick cheerfully.
"For the wedding, you know. You've got to give me away, and be
bridesmaid, and all that sort of thing."

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 bo