“And you, dear?” she asked.
“Me? Oh, I shall stop here, of course. I can’t leave.”
Maud left her place, and dragged a chair up beside him.
“Thurso, you are admirable,” she said. “It’s an excellent idea moving them up here, so excellent that I wonder I did not think of it first. But as for my going back to town——”
“But how on earth can you stop here with the house crammed full of typhoid patients?”
“Same way as you can. I leave here when you leave.”
“But, Maud——”
“There isn’t any ‘but, Maud.’ I don’t go unless you turn me out into the cold bleak night—oh, let’s poke up the fire, I am sure there is a frost!—in which case I shall die of exposure on the lawn. To begin with, there is no risk of infection, and, to go on with, I shouldn’t catch it if there was.”
“Oh! Why not?”
“Because one is mercifully allowed to get through the day’s work. I came up here as your ‘pal.’ And if I went to bed with typhoid I couldn’t be anybody’s ‘pal.’ Besides, I’ve had typhoid already. At the present moment I am going to play you at picquet, and you owe me nine shillings from last night.”