h an
effort to be easy. "But before I, at least, can do any talking I must
get warm. I'm chilled--chilled to the bone." And indeed he looked it.
His hollow eyes, his bluish lips, his red hands and white fingers
indicated his condition, and he had also a short, spasmodic cough,
which Crabbe had never noticed at St. Ignace. Suddenly in the guide
there awoke the host, the patron, and he drew the blind, placed chairs
and grumbled at the stove-pipe.

"Oh for an open fire!" he cried. "Eh, Ringfield? One of your little
Canadian open stoves would do, a grate--anything to sit before! Why,
man, I'm afraid you have got a touch of the ague, or something worse,
perhaps pneumonia."

"Not as bad as that, surely," returned the other with his wry smile.
"I walked from the station to save a cab, and I'm only a little
chilled."

"A warm drink!" cried Crabbe, from the depths of his new and hospitable
instincts. "Say the word, and I'll order it. By heaven,
Ringfield,--you look poorly, and I've wanted one myself all day." His
hand was on the bell.

"No, no! Don't make a fuss over me. I shall be all right after a
while. Besides I never take anything of the kind you mean, I fancy.
Some camphor--if you had that, or a cup of boiling hot tea. I'll go
downstairs and ask for that. Or coffee."

"Tea! Good Lord! Tea, to a man sickening with pneumonia!"

"But I'm not--really I'm not. I'm feeling warmer already."

"I know better. 'A hot Scotch,'" he said. "Oh for some of the
Clairville brandy now, eh? By the way, her brother's dead."

Ringfield shivered, but not this time on account of the cold. Some
strange sensation always attacked him when Crabbe spoke of Pauline.

"Yes. I did not hear of it until she returned."

"She went to see him, then?"

"Yes."

"That must have been after I left. Poor girl! Well, was she very
knocked up? Have you seen her?"

Ringfield shook his head and the guide attributed the action more to
cold than to sympathy. His mind was made up; Ringfield must take
something, must be warmed up and made fit, and whisky was the only
means known to the Englishman, who did not own a "Manual of
Homoeopathy". Whisky it must be. Again his hand went to the bell, and
again Ringfield remonstrated, but his _gauche_ utterances were of no
avail in face of Crabbe's decision of character and natural lording of
it. The boy appeared, the order was dispatched, and as Ringfield
noticed the growing exaltation