“Gracious!” gasped Miss Ebag.  “The poor dear thing will have pneumonia.  Sister, you know his chest is not strong.  Dear Mr Ullman, please, please, do go and—­er—­change.”

He did the discreet thing and went to bed, hot whisky following him on a tray carried by the housemaid.

VI

The next morning the slightly unusual happened.  It was the custom for Carl Ullman to breakfast alone, while reading The Staffordshire Signal.  The ladies Ebag breakfasted mysteriously in bed.  But on this morning Carl found Miss Ebag before him in the breakfast-room.  She prosecuted minute inquiries as to his health and nerves.  She went out with him to regard the rhododendron bushes, and shuddered at the sight of the ruin which had saved him.  She said, following famous philosophers, that Chance was merely the name we give to the effect of laws which we cannot understand.  And, upon this high level of conversation, she poured forth his coffee and passed his toast.

It was a lovely morning after the tempest.

Goldie, all newly combed, and looking as though he had never seen a roof, strolled pompously into the room with tail unfurled.  Miss Ebag picked the animal up and kissed it passionately.

“Darling!” she murmured, not exactly to Mr Ullman, nor yet exactly to the cat.  Then she glanced effulgently at Carl and said, “When I think that you risked your precious life, in that awful storm, to save my poor Goldie?...  You must have guessed how dear he was to me?...  No, really, Mr Ullman, I cannot thank you properly!  I can’t express my—­”

Her eyes were moist.

Although not young, she was two years younger.  Her age was two years less.  The touch of man had never profaned her.  No masculine kiss had ever rested on that cheek, that mouth.  And Carl felt that he might be the first to cull the flower that had so long waited.  He did not see, just then, the hollow beneath her chin, the two lines of sinew that, bounding a depression, disappeared beneath her collarette.  He saw only her soul.  He guessed that she would be more malleable than the widow, and he was sure that she was not in a position, as the widow was, to make comparisons between husbands.  Certainly there appeared to be some confusion as to the proprietorship of this cat.  Certainly he could not have saved the cat’s life for love of two different persons.  But that was beside the point.  The essential thing was that he began to be glad that he had decided nothing definite about the widow on the previous evening.

“Darling!” said she again, with a new access of passion, kissing Goldie, but darting a glance at Carl.

He might have put to her the momentous question, between two bites of buttered toast, had not Mrs Ebag, at the precise instant, swum amply into the room.

“Sister!  You up!” exclaimed Miss Ebag.

“And you, sister!” retorted Mrs Ebag.