downstairs was also the noise of the Major choking in the fog. It came
slowly down, and tried hard to stop, in order that its source might
speak intelligibly to the visitors. What time the superior person stood
and grudged the gas. In the end, speech of a sort was squeezed out
slowly, as the landlady, stung to action by the needless gas-waste,
plucked the words out of the speaker's mouth at intervals, and finished
them up for him. The information came piecemeal; but in substance it
was that he had the day before found his old friend coughing his liver
up in this dam fog, and had taken on himself to fetch the medical man
and a nurse; that these latter, though therapeutically useless, as is
the manner of doctors and nurses, had common-sense enough to back him
(Roper) in his view that Mrs. Fenwick ought to be sent for, although
the patient opposed their doing so. So he took upon himself to wire.
There wasn't any occasion whatever for alarm, ma'am! Not the slightest.
"You hear me, and mark what I say--an old stager, ma'am! Ever such
a little common-sense, and half the patients would recover!" A few
details of the rapid increase of the fever, of the patient's resistance
to the sending of his message, and an indication of a curious feeling
on the old Colonel's part that it wouldn't be correct form to go back
to be nursed through a second attack when he had so lately got safe
out of the first one. All this landed the speaker in something near
suffocation, and made his hearers protest, quite uselessly, against his
again exposing himself to the fog. Whereon the landlady, with a finger
on the gas-tap, nodded toward the convulsed old officer to supply her
speech with a nominative, and spoke. What she said was merely: "Hasn't
been to bed." And then waited for Rosalind to go upstairs with such
aggressive patience that the latter could only say a word or two of
thanks to Major Roper and pass up. He, for his part, went quicker
downstairs to avoid the thanks, and the gas-tap vigil came to a sudden
end the moment Rosalind turned the handle of the door above.... Now,
what is the object of all this endless detail of what might have been
easily told in three words--well, in thirty, certainly?

Simply this: to show you why Fenwick, following on after some
discussion with the cab below, was practically invisible to the
asthmatic one, who passed him on the stairs just as the light above
vanished. So he had no chance of recognizing the donor of