"Darling, what has gone wrong?"
"It's Lenox. He's down with it. Not severe as yet. But there's no mistaking what it is."
Her faint colour—it had grown perceptibly fainter in the past week—left her face.
"Oh, his poor wife! We must send a wire at once."
"I've sent one already, by the orderly who went for Courtenay. Told her she should have news every day, for the present."
"Oh, bless you, Theo! You think of everything!"
"Steady, Honor, steady," he rebuked her gently. "We've got to do a fair share of thinking between us just now. Paul can safely stay on if one isolates that side of the house; and Zyarulla and I can do everything for Lenox between us. As for you, John must give you a bed till we're through."
"But, Theo . . ."
"Be quiet!" he broke in almost roughly; adding on a changed note: "For once in a way, my dearest, you will obey orders without question—or go altogether. Now give me the chlorodyne, and let me get back to poor Lenox. Seems brutal to give him any form of opium after all he's been through. Hullo, there's Richardson shouting outside. He'll be terribly cut up when he knows."
It transpired that Richardson had come over, post-haste, to report three cases among his men; and at sun-down the little mountain battery, with its three subalterns and full camp equipment, marched out into the open desert, scornfully overlooked by that Pisgah height of the Frontier, the Takti Suliman, whose square-cut crags were printed in sharp outline upon a stainless sky.