train should be directed to me aboard "The
Seminole"--the private car of Mr. Cardross.... Is all this clear?...
Thank you."

With a confused idea that he was being ordered about too frequently of
late Portlaw waddled off bedward; but sleep eluded him; he lay there
watching through his window the light in the window of the sick-room
where Hamil lay fighting for breath; and sometimes he quivered all over
in scared foreboding, and sometimes the thought that Malcourt was
returning seemed to ease for a moment the dread load of responsibility
that was already playing the mischief with his digestion.

A curry had started it; a midnight golden-buck superimposed upon a
miniature mince pie had, to his grief and indignation, continued an
outrageous conspiracy against his liver begun by the shock of Hamil's
illness. But what completed his exasperation was the indifference of the
physicians attending Hamil who did not seem to appreciate the gravity of
an impaired digestive system, or comprehend that a man who couldn't
enjoy eating might as well be in Hamil's condition; and Portlaw angrily
swallowed the calomel so indifferently shoved toward him and hunted up
Wayward, to whom he aired his deeply injured feelings.

"What you need are 'Drover's Remedies,'" observed Wayward, peering at
him through his spectacles; and Portlaw unsuspiciously made a memorandum
of the famous live-stock and kennel panacea for future personal
emergencies.

The weather was unfavourable for Hamil; a raw, wet wind rattled the
windows; the east lowered thick and gray with hurrying clouds; volleys
of chilly rain swept across the clearing from time to time.

Portlaw and Wayward sat most of the time in the big living-room playing
"Canfield." There was nothing else to do except to linger somewhere
within call, and wait. Constance Palliser remained near whichever nurse
happened to be off duty, and close enough to the sick-room to shudder at
what she heard from within, all day, all night, ceaselessly ominous,
pitiable, heart-breaking.

At length Wayward took her away without ceremony into the open air.

"Look here, Constance, your sitting there and hearing such things isn't
helping Garry. Lansdale is doing everything that can be done; Miss Race
and Miss Clay are competent. You're simply frightening yourself sick--"

She protested, but he put her into a hooded ulster, buckled on her feet
a pair of heavy carriage boots, and drew her arm under his, saying: "If
t