nic
bronchitis, complicated with spasm of the glottis; and, in a dead, flat
voice, with a sunken eye that looked and saw not, told me what washes,
gargles, pastilles, and inhalations she had proved most beneficial. From
her I was passed on to her younger sister, Miss Elizabeth, a small and
withered thing with twitching lips, victim, she told me, to very
much the same sort of throat, but secretly devoted to another set of
medicines. When she went away with Baxter and the bath-chair, I fell
across a major of the Indian army with gout in his glassy eyes, and a
stomach which he had taken all round the Continent. He laid everything
before me; and him I escaped only to be confided in by a matron with
a tendency to follicular tonsilitis and eczema. Baxter waited hand and
foot on his cousins till five o'clock, trying, as I saw, to atone for
his treatment of the dead sister. Miss Mary ordered him about like a
dog.

"I warned you it would be dull," he said when we met in the
smoking-room.

"It's tremendously interesting," I said. "But how about a look round the
links?"

"Unluckily damp always affects my eldest cousin. I've got to buy her a
new bronchitis-kettle. Arthurs broke her old one yesterday."

We slipped out to the chemist's shop in the town, and he bought a large
glittering tin thing whose workings he explained.

"I'm used to this sort of work. I come up here pretty often," he said.
"I've the family throat too."

"You're a good man," I said. "A very good man."

He turned towards me in the evening light among the beeches, and his
face was changed to what it might have been a generation before.

"You see," he said huskily, "there was the youngest--Agnes. Before
she fell ill, you know. But she didn't like leaving her sisters. Never
would." He hurried on with his odd-shaped load and left me among the
ruins of my black theories. The man with that face had done Agnes
Moultrie no wrong.

We never played our game. I was waked between two and three in the
morning from my hygienic bed by Baxter in an ulster over orange and
white pyjamas, which I should never have suspected from his character.

"My cousin has had some sort of a seizure," he said. "Will you come? I
don't want to wake the doctor. Don't want to make a scandal. Quick!"

So I came quickly, and led by the white-haired Arthurs in a jacket and
petticoat, entered a double-bedded room reeking with steam and Friar's
Balsam. The electrics were all on. Miss Mary--I