“They’re rather heavy, sir, for a sick-room.  Would you—­would you mind—­taking them off?”

“Upon my word, you’re a cool one!”

But there was something in the quiet self-possession of the woman which coerced, while it exasperated him.  He perceived plainly that she took him for a madman to be managed.  Yet, after glaring at her for a moment, he sat down fuming, and removed his boots.  She smiled.

“That’ll do nicely, sir.  Now if you don’t mind coming very quietly—­”

She glided to the door of the drawing-room, opened it noiselessly and beckoned to Melrose.  He went in, and, against his will, he went on tiptoe, and holding his breath.

Inside, he looked round the darkened room in angry amazement.  It had been wholly transformed.  The open windows had been cleaned and curtained; the oak floor shone as though it had been recently washed; there was a table on which were medicine bottles and glasses, with a chair or two; while in the centre of the room, carefully screened from light, was a white bed.  Upon it, a motionless form.

“Poor young fellow!” whispered the nurse, standing beside Melrose, her kind face softening.  “He has been conscious a little to-day—­the doctor is hopeful.  But he has been very badly hurt.”

Melrose surveyed him—­the interloper!—­who represented to him at that moment one of those unexpected checks and annoyances in life, which selfish men with strong wills cannot and do not attempt to bear.  His privacy, his habits, his freedom—­all at the mercy of this white-faced boy, these two intolerable women, and the still more intolerable doctor, on whom he intended to inflect a stinging lesson!  No doubt the whole thing had been done by the wretched pill-man with a view to his own fees.  It was a plant!—­an infamous conspiracy.

He came closer.  Not a boy, after all.  A young man of thirty—­perhaps more.  The brow and head were covered with bandages; the eyes were closed; the bloodless mouth hung slightly open, with a look of pain.  The comeliness of the dark, slightly bearded face was not entirely disguised by the dressings in which the head was swathed; and the chest and arms, from which the bedclothes had been folded back, were finely, though sparely, moulded.  Melrose, whose life was spent among artistic objects was not insensible to the young man’s good looks, as they were visible even under his bandages and in the dim light, and for the first time he felt a slight stir of pity.

He left the room, beckoning to the night nurse.

“What’s his name?”

“We took some cards from his pocket.  I think, sir, the doctor put them here for you to see.”

The nurse went to the hall table and brought one.

“Claude Faversham, 5 Temple Buildings, E.C.”

“Some young loafer, pretending to be a barrister,” said Melrose contemptuously.  “What’s he doing here—­in May?  This is not the tourist season.  What business had he to be here at all?  I have no doubt whatever that he was drunk, otherwise why should he have had an accident?  Nobody else ever had an accident on that hill.  Why should he, eh?  Why should he?  And how the deuce are we to get at his relations?”