"Shall I light the fire now, 'm?" asked Elsie timidly at the door.
"Yes," said the doctor shortly, including both the women in his glance.
"But won't she be disturbing you while you're ..." Violet suggested anxiously. She was afraid that this unprecedented proceeding would terribly upset Henry and so make him worse.
"Not at all."
"I don't think we've ever had this fire lighted," said Violet, to which the doctor deigned no reply.
"Run along, Elsie. Take your things off and be quick. The doctor wants a fire immediately."
Before the doctor, changed now from an aggrieved human being into a scrupulously conscientious professional adviser, had finished his examination, the room was half full of smoke. Violet could not help looking at Elsie reproachfully as if to say: "Really, Elsie, you should be able to control the chimney better than this—and your master so ill!"
The patient coughed excessively, but everyone knew that the coughing was merely his protest against the madness of lighting a fire.
"I'm too hot," he muttered. "I'm too hot."
And such was the power of auto-suggestion that he did in fact feel too hot, though the fire had not begun to give out any appreciable heat. He privately determined to have the fire out as soon as the doctor had departed; a limit must be set to folly after all. However, Henry was at once faced with a great new crisis which diminished the question of the fire to a detail.