ay cloud; "only
don't _bother_ me about it!"

Phyllis jumped to her feet, a whirl of gay blue skirts and cheerfully
tossing blue feathers. "Good-by, dear Crusader!" she said with a catch
in her voice that might have been either a laugh or a sob. "The next
time you see me you'll probably _hate_ me! Wallis!"

Wallis appeared like the Slave of the Lamp. "It's all right, Wallis,"
she said, and ran. Wallis proceeded thereupon to wheel his master's
couch into the bedroom.

"If you're going to be moved, you'd better be dressed a little heavier,
sir," he said with the same amiable guilelessness, if the victim had but
noticed it, which Phyllis had used from her seat on the floor not long
before.

"Very well," said Allan resignedly from his cloud. And Wallis proceeded
to suit the action to the word.

Allan let him go on in unnoticing silence till it came to that totally
unfamiliar thing these seven years, a stand-up collar. A shiningly new
linen collar of the newest cut, a beautiful golden-brown knit tie, a
gray suit----

"What on earth?" inquired Allan, awakening from his lethargy. "I don't
need a collar and tie to keep me from getting cold on a journey across
the house. And where did you get those clothes? They look new."

Wallis laid his now fully dressed master back to a reclining
position--he had been propped up--and tucked a handkerchief into the
appropriate pocket as he replied, "Grant & Moxley's, sir, where you
always deal." And he wheeled the couch back to the day-room, over to its
very door.

It did not occur to Allan, as he was being carried downstairs by Wallis
and Arthur, another of the servants, that anything more than a change of
rooms was intended; nor, as he was carried out at its door to a long
closed carriage, that it was anything worse than his new keeper's
mistaken idea that drives would be good for him. He was a little
irritable at the length and shutupness of the drive, though, as his cot
had been swung deftly from the ceiling of the carriage, he was not
jarred. But when Wallis and Arthur carried the light pallet on which he
lay swiftly up a plank walk laid to the door of a private car--why then
it began to occur to Allan Harrington that something was happening.
And--which rather surprised himself--he did not lift a supercilious
eyebrow and say in a soft, apathetic voice, "Very we-ell!" Instead, he
turned his head towards the devoted Wallis, who had helped two
conductors swing the cot from the ce