.'

'I don't envy you. She's never darkened my doors, thank goodness, since
I left Harvey at your place. I suppose she'll run about the county now
swearing you cured him. That's a woman's idea of gratitude.' Attley
seemed rather hurt, and Mrs. Godfrey laughed.

'That proves you were right about Miss Sichliffe, Ella,' I said. 'She
had no designs on anybody.'

'I'm always right in these matters. But didn't she even offer you a
goldfish?'

'Not a thing,' said I. 'You know what an old maid's like where her
precious dog's concerned.' And though I have tried vainly to lie to Ella
Godfrey for many years, I believe that in this case I succeeded.

When I turned into our drive that evening, Leggatt observed half aloud:

'I'm glad Zvengali's back where he belongs. It's time our Mike had a
look in.'

Sure enough, there was Malachi back again in spirit as well as flesh,
but still with that odd air of expectation he had picked up from Harvey.

* * * * *

It was in January that Attley wrote me that Mrs. Godfrey, wintering in
Madeira with Milly, her unmarried daughter, had been attacked with
something like enteric; that the hotel, anxious for its good name, had
thrust them both out into a cottage annexe; that he was off with a
nurse, and that I was not to leave England till I heard from him again.
In a week he wired that Milly was down as well, and that I must bring
out two more nurses, with suitable delicacies.

Within seventeen hours I had got them all aboard the Cape boat, and had
seen the women safely collapsed into sea-sickness. The next few weeks
were for me, as for the invalids, a low delirium, clouded with fantastic
memories of Portuguese officials trying to tax calves'-foot jelly;
voluble doctors insisting that true typhoid was unknown in the island;
nurses who had to be exercised, taken out of themselves, and returned on
the tick of change of guard; night slides down glassy, cobbled streets,
smelling of sewage and flowers, between walls whose every stone and
patch Attley and I knew; vigils in stucco verandahs, watching the curve
and descent of great stars or drawing auguries from the break of dawn;
insane interludes of gambling at the local Casino, where we won heaps of
unconsoling silver; blasts of steamers arriving and departing in the
roads; help offered by total strangers, grabbed at or thrust aside; the
long nightmare crumbling back into sanity one forenoon under a
vine-covered