"Very well, then," she said heroically, "I won't ask you a single thing. But you'll tell me the minute you can, won't you? And you'll let me help?"
"Nobody can help, no one can advise me," Edred said. "I've got to do it off my own bat if I do it at all. Now you just shut up, I want to think."
This unusual desire quite awed Elfrida. But it irritated her too.
"Perhaps you'd like me to go away," she said ironically.
And Edred's wholly unexpected reply was, "Yes, please."
So she went.
And when she was gone Edred sat down on the box at the foot of his bed and tried to think. But it was not easy.
"I ought to go," he told himself.
"But think of your father," said something else which was himself too.
He thought so hard that his thoughts got quite confused. His head grew very hot, and his hands and feet very cold. Mrs. Honeysett came in, exclaimed at his white face, felt his hands, said he was in a high fever, and put him to bed with wet rags on his forehead and hot-water bottles to his feet. Perhaps he was feverish. At any rate he could never be sure afterwards whether there really had been a very polite and plausible black mole sitting on his pillow most of the day saying all those things which the part of himself that he liked least agreed with. Such things as—