Lance positively gasped. "Rath-er! Why! you told me yesterday I wasn't to move a muscle for ten days!" Dr. Dillon positively blushed, under the brown. He got up vexedly, walked to the parapet, looked down the river towards the mission house, and came back again.
"No more you are!" he said fiercely. "Not what you call moving. But gentle exercise and--and congenial society--and all that! You know the treatment! Besides the Hutton-Wharton-Hood school don't believe in rest. And--and--look here!--I'll put you on the stiffest starch bandage ever made--and--Oh! confound it, man, one must risk something sometimes, you know! Here, orderly; go over to the sahib's washerman and tell him to make me double-extra-white-shirt-front-starch, and if that doesn't counteract the--the indiscretion--why--why--I wash my hands of the whole business!"
He was at work undoing the bandages already, and the last part of his remarks came, argumentatively, to himself.
"If you really think it might injure me permanently," began Lance, soberly, in some surprise.
Dr. Dillon paused, and looked up with a vast resentment. "If you mean your foot, I don't think it will, and that's all I'm responsible for--thank God!"
But as, half an hour after this, he came out from saying good-by to Erda Shepherd, he paused as he passed the Pool of Immortality, and looked down into it as if he felt some need of salvation.
"'If I be not damned for this!'" he quoted softly, shook his head, and went back to his prisoners.
So it came to pass that when Erda Shepherd--after laying the wreath she had brought as a sort of crown to Akbar Khân's 'crass'--went into the garden for a last look at the familiar places, she found Lance Carlyon comfortably settled in one of the balconies overhanging the river.
"This is luck!" he cried, forgetting the starched bandage until reminded of it by a sudden twinge of pain. "I thought I was never to see you again, and it seemed a bit rough--on--on us both; considering what a lot we did together, you know. I've been writing you a letter, to say how disappointed I was at not being able to get over and see you all this morning."
"That was very kind of you," she said feebly, conscious that the surprise had made her feel a little limp. Though, of course, she regretted nothing; nothing at all!