"No, no! Don't make a fuss over me. I shall be all right after a while. Besides I never take anything of the kind you mean, I fancy. Some camphor—if you had that, or a cup of boiling hot tea. I'll go downstairs and ask for that. Or coffee."
"Tea! Good Lord! Tea, to a man sickening with pneumonia!"
"But I'm not—really I'm not. I'm feeling warmer already."
"I know better. 'A hot Scotch,'" he said. "Oh for some of the
Clairville brandy now, eh? By the way, her brother's dead."
Ringfield shivered, but not this time on account of the cold. Some strange sensation always attacked him when Crabbe spoke of Pauline.
"Yes. I did not hear of it until she returned."
"She went to see him, then?"
"Yes."
"That must have been after I left. Poor girl! Well, was she very knocked up? Have you seen her?"
Ringfield shook his head and the guide attributed the action more to cold than to sympathy. His mind was made up; Ringfield must take something, must be warmed up and made fit, and whisky was the only means known to the Englishman, who did not own a "Manual of Homoeopathy". Whisky it must be. Again his hand went to the bell, and again Ringfield remonstrated, but his gauche utterances were of no avail in face of Crabbe's decision of character and natural lording of it. The boy appeared, the order was dispatched, and as Ringfield noticed the growing exaltation in the guide's manner, a sort of sickness stole upon him. Here, thrust into his hand, was the greatest opportunity yet given to him to preserve a human soul and to save the woman he loved, but he looked on, dazed, uncomfortable, half guilty.