“Oh, the specialist looked devilish wise the last time he examined him; but that was about all it amounted to. It seems they know next to nothing about sleepy sickness. I understood him to say that the brain cells are all churned up with the inflammation; and the result may be anything you please. Of course Arthur was lucky to get off with no physical damage—his eyesight and hearing and all that are quite all right. But it seems one can never tell what changes may have taken place in the brain structure—things that don’t normally show at all. He may be all right, for all one can tell. Or again, he might turn into a homicidal maniac any day; and then, as like as not, he’d go for the nearest relation handy. A nice sort of fellow to have in one’s neighbourhood.”
The barrister evidently considered this prophecy exaggerated.
“He seems quite normal to me,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t worry much over him,” Roger admitted. “It’s just that he’s got on my nerves so much that I can hardly see him without snapping at him. I’ll have to get rid of him, I think; send him on a sea-voyage or something of that sort.”
“Perhaps you get on his nerves, just the same way as he gets on yours,” Ernest began in his low voice. “That’s what usually happens. When one starts it, the other takes it up. Usually that’s the way these things go. I shouldn’t wonder—hullo, Sylvia! I didn’t expect you just yet; not for quite a while. I’m not quite ready.”
A girl in her early twenties had come into the room and now stood looking at her uncle with a fair pretence of indignation.
Sylvia Hawkhurst, the sister of the piano-playing Arthur, had been left an orphan before she came of age; and as her uncles were her trustees, she and her brother had been brought to Whistlefield by Roger Shandon. She liked “to play at house-keeping,” as she put it: and Roger soon learned that she could run his small establishment better than any paid housekeeper. Things went like clockwork after she had taken command; and he soon realised that the secret of her management was that everyone in the house adored her. One thing she had set her face against: “We’ll have no men-servants, if you please, uncle; at least, not in the house itself. I don’t mind a chauffeur, of course. But I know what a girl can do, and I’d prefer to keep within my limitations, if it’s all the same to you.” Her uncle had let her have her way, and he had never found any reason to complain of the results.
Sylvia’s housekeeping, however, occupied very little of her time. She hunted in the season, drove her own car, played tennis well and golf better still, and was reckoned one of the best dancers in the neighbourhood. Most characteristic of all, in spite of her looks, she was as popular with girls as with men.
As she came into the room, Ernest got out of his chair with his usual deliberation and began a faintly shamefaced apology for his unpreparedness; but she cut him short in mock irritation.
“He hasn’t even got his boots on!” she complained. “How is it that I can run everything to time in this house except you? Are you ever in time for anything, Uncle Ernest?”