By the time we had laid him
out on a mattress in a cool tent, with the fresh air blowing about him,
and had made him eat the meal prepared for him, he really began to look
comparatively comfortable.
Lady Meadowcroft was now our chief trouble. We did not dare to tell her
it was really plague; but she had got near enough back to civilisation
to have recovered her faculty for profuse grumbling; and the idea of the
delay that Sebastian would cause us drove her wild with annoyance. "Only
two days off from Ivor," she cried, "and that comfortable bungalow! And
now to think we must stop here in the woods a week or ten days for this
horrid old Professor! Why can't he get worse at once and die like a
gentleman? But, there! with YOU to nurse him, Hilda, he'll never get
worse. He couldn't die if he tried. He'll linger on and on for weeks and
weeks through a beastly convalescence!"
"Hubert," Hilda said to me, when we were alone once more; "we mustn't
keep her here. She will be a hindrance, not a help. One way or another
we must manage to get rid of her."
"How can we?" I asked. "We can't turn her loose upon the mountain roads
with a Nepaulese escort.
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