When they were settled in the villa near the oasis (Saidee and Victoria too, for they needed no urging to wait till it was known whether Nevill Caird would live or die) Lady MacGregor said with her usual briskness to Stephen: "Of course I've telegraphed to that creature."
Stephen looked at her blankly.
"That hard-hearted little beast, Josette Soubise," the fairy aunt explained.
Stephen could hardly help laughing, though he had seldom felt less merry. But that the tiny Lady MacGregor should refer to tall Josette, who was nearly twice her height, as a "little beast," struck him as somewhat funny. Besides, her toy-terrier snappishness was comic.
"I've nothing against the girl," Lady MacGregor felt it right to go on, "except that she's an idiot to bite off her nose to spite her own face—and Nevill's too. I don't approve of her at all as a wife for him, you must understand. Nevill could marry a princess, and she's nothing but a little school-teacher with a dimple or two, whose mother and father were less than nobody. Still, as Nevill wants her, she might have the grace to show appreciation of the honour, by not spoiling his life. He's never been the same since he went and fell in love with her, and she refused him."
"You've telegraphed to Tlemcen that Nevill is ill?" Stephen ventured.
"I've telegraphed to the creature that she'd better come here at once, if she wants to see him alive," replied Lady MacGregor. "I suppose she loves him in her French-Algerian way, and she must have saved up enough money for the fare. Anyhow, if Nevill doesn't live, I happen to know he's left her nearly everything, except what the poor boy imagines I ought to have. That's pouring coals of fire on her head!"
"Don't think of his not living!" exclaimed Stephen.
"Honestly I believe he won't live unless that idiot of a girl comes and purrs and promises to marry him, deathbed or no deathbed."
Again Stephen smiled faintly. "You're a matchmaker, Lady MacGregor," he said. "You are one of the most subtle persons I ever saw."