"Eh?" cried Peter. "What's that?"
"It's none of my business," answered McPherson. "And it's all very well as it stands—if she wants Frederik. But if you want to do anything for her future welfare, take my advice, and do it now."
"You mean," Peter said evenly, between stiffening lips, "you mean that I could—die?"
"Every one can," replied McPherson with elephantine lightness. "And at one time or another, every one does. It's a thing to be prepared for."
"One moment," urged Grimm, the keen little eyes piercing the other's badly woven cloak of indifference. "You think that I——!"
"I mean nothing more nor less, Peter, than that the machinery is wearing out. There's absolutely no cause for apprehension. Still, I thought I had better tell you."
"But," asked Grimm with a pathetic insistence, "if there's no cause for apprehension——?"
"Listen, Peter: when I cured you of that cold the other day—the cold you got by tramping around like an idiot among the wet flower-beds without rubbers—I made a discovery of—of something I can't cure."
Grimm studied his friend's unreadable face for an instant with an almost painful intensity. Then a smile swept away the worry from his own visage.
"Oh, Andrew, you old croaking Scotch raven," he cried. "Your professional ways will be the death of some one yet. But the 'some one' won't be Peter Grimm. That sick bed manner is splendid for bullying old maids into taking their tonic. But it's wasted on a grown man. No, no, Andrew. You can't make me out an invalid. You doctors are a sorry lot. You pour medicines of which you know little into systems of which you know nothing. You condemn people to death as the old Inquisition would have blushed to. Why, every day we read in the papers about some frisky boy a hundred years old whom the doctors gave up for lost when he was twenty-five. And," the forced gaiety in his voice merging into aggressive resolve, "I'm going to live to see children in this old house of mine. Katje's babies creeping about this very floor; sliding down those bannisters over there, pulling the ears of Lad, my collie."