"Jerry!" she summoned him back, and he came, risking the wrath of the driver. "Come along to-night, will yer, after ye've done? Rap quiet on the door. I might want yer."
"Right O, Elsie!" He was gone. The lorry was gone.
Elsie went upstairs again with the umbrella, not because the umbrella would not have been safe in the shop, but because she felt that she must give another glance at Joe before she left the premises. It was an unconsidered movement. She had forgotten that Mr. Earlforward's bedroom door was open.
"Elsie," he called out, as she passed on the landing, "who was that?"
Her tired and exasperated brain worked with extraordinary swiftness. She decided that she could not enter into a long explanation concerning the umbrella and Jerry. Why should she? "He" was already suspicious.
"Postman," she answered, without the slightest hesitation, lying as glibly and lightly as a born, lifelong liar, and continued her way upstairs. She was somehow vaguely, indirectly, defending the secrecy of Joe.
In her room she put the umbrella in its paper again under her bed, gazing at Joe as she did so. Joe was very ill. She had given him two doses of quinine (which Dr. Raste, making Elsie ashamed of her uncharitable judgments on him, had had sent direct from a chemist's within an hour and a half of his departure), and she was disturbed that the medicine had not produced an immediate and marked effect on the patient.
Joe had got one arm through the ironwork at the head of the bed, and was tearing off little slips of the peeling wallpaper in the corner. She took hold of his hot hand, and silently guided it back through the ironwork on to the bed.
"Shall I give you another dose?" she suggested tentatively, with brow creased.
He nodded. He knew malaria and he knew quinine; and, fortified by his expert approval, she gave him another dose. Both of them had the belief that if five grains of a medicine did you ten per cent. of "good," ten grains would assuredly do you twenty per cent. of good, and so on in proportion.