my inveterate adversary who has kept life in me
for many a year, came in with his confounded pink smiling face.

"What's this I hear? Been overdoing it?"

"What the deuce are you doing here?" I cried. "Go away. How dare you
come when you're not wanted?"

He grinned. "I'm wanted right enough, old man. The good Marigold's
never at fault. He rang me up and I slipped round at once."

"One of these days," said I, "I'll murder that fellow."

He replied by gagging me with his beastly thermometer. Then he felt my
pulse and listened to my heart and stuck his fingers into the corners
of my eyes, so as to look at the whites; and when he was quite
satisfied with himself--there is only one animal more self-complacent
than your medical man in such circumstances, and that is a dog who has
gorged himself with surreptitious meat--he ordained that I should
forthwith go properly to bed and stay there and be perfectly quiet
until he came again, and in the meanwhile swallow some filthy medicine
which he would send round.

"One of these days," said he, rebukingly, "instead of murdering your
devoted Sergeant, you'll be murdering yourself, if you go on such
lunatic excursions. Of course I'm shocked at hearing about Colonel
Boyce, and I'm sorry for the poor lady, but why you should have been
made to half kill yourself over the matter is more than I can
understand."

"I happen," said I, "to be his only intimate friend in the place."

"You happen," he retorted, "to be a chronic invalid and the most
infernal worry of my life."

"You're nothing but an overbearing bully," said I.

He grinned again. That is what I have to put up with. If I curse
Marigold, he takes no notice. If I curse Cliffe, he grins. Yet what I
should do without them, Heaven only knows.

"God bless 'em both," said I, when my aching body was between the cool
sheets.

Although it was none of his duties, Marigold brought me in a light
supper, fish and a glass of champagne. Never a parlour-maid would he
allow to approach me when I was unwell. I often wondered what would
happen if I were really ill and required the attendance of a nurse. I
swear no nurse's touch could be so gentle as when he raised me on the
pillows. He bent over the tray on the table by the bed and began to
dissect out the back-bone of the sole.

"I can do that," said I, fretfully.

He cocked a solitary reproachful eye on me. I burst out laughing. He
looked so dear and ridiculous with his prepostero