“Dear me! I am very sorry. Poor boy! I’m afraid I have neglected him. His poor father was so kind to me.”
“Everybody has neglected him, sir,” cried Mrs Dunn, “and the doctor says that the poor boy will die.”
“Mrs Dunn, you shock me,” cried the professor, with the tears in his eyes, and his whole manner changing. “Is it so bad as this?”
“Quite, sir,” cried the lawyer, “and I want to consult you as my co-executor and trustee about getting the boy somewhere in the south of England or to France.”
“But medical assistance,” said the professor. “We must have the best skill in London.”
“He has had it, sir,” cried Mrs Dunn, “and they can’t do anything for him. He’s in a decline.”
“There, sir, you hear,” said the lawyer. “Now, then, what’s to be done?”
“Done!” cried the professor, with a display of animation that surprised the others. “He must be removed to a warmer country at once. I had no idea that matters were so bad as this. Mr Burne, Mrs Dunn, I am a student much interested in a work I am writing on the Byzantine empire, and I was starting in a few days for Asia Minor. My passage was taken. But all that must be set aside, and I will stop and see to my dear old friend’s son.”
Poo woomp poomp. Pah!
Mr Burne blew a perfectly triumphal blast with his pocket-handkerchief, took out his snuff-box, put it back, jumped up, and, crossing to where the professor was standing, shook his hand very warmly, and without a word, while Mrs Dunn wiped her eyes upon her very stiff watered silk apron, but found the result so unsatisfactory that she smoothed it down, and hunted out a pocket-handkerchief from somewhere among the folds of her dress and polished her eyes dry.