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surrounded him with hot-water bottles and made him swallow a large dose of brandy – which I should imagine he was by then not unwilling to do.
    By all these strenuous methods Glen Brougham was no more than mildly amused. Having made his examination, he pooh-poohed the diagnosis of food poisoning which his sister had voiced, confirmed a suspicion of an incipient gastric ulcer and pronounced the case one of epidemic diarrhoea, of which there had been several instances in the village during the summer. He assured Frances and me that there was no danger and no need for us to stay any longer.
    ‘Oughtn’t he to have a nurse?’ Frances asked.
    ‘No need,’ Glen replied laconically. ‘He can afford one if he wants the luxury, but Mitzi and Angela can look after him well enough.’ Glen was the Waterhouses’ and our friend as well as our doctor – one of my oldest friends in fact, for I had been brought up in Anneypenny with Glen and Rona – and he was therefore able to be rather unprofessionally outspoken. Glen always had been rather unprofessional, for that matter.
    ‘Angela!’ exclaimed Rona. ‘No, if Angela will let me, I’ll nurse John myself. I look on him,’ she added with a rather forced smile, ‘as my patient, you see.’
    Glen guffawed. ‘I believe you still think your diagnosis was the right one.’
    Rona shrugged her shoulders and turned away.
    Unsnubbed, Glen spoke to us. ‘The old idiot deserved to have a tummy-ache, and I told him so. I made him up a bottle of medicine this morning – one tablespoonful to be taken every four hours – wrote the label myself as plain as I’m speaking to you now: and what does he do? Goes and swigs off half the bottle at a go. Says he had a pain and thought it would take it away. What can you expect with a chap like that?’
    ‘Then that’s what made him so bad?’ Frances cried.
    But Glen shook his head. ‘No, couldn’t be. There was nothing to hurt – luckily!’
    ‘What was the medicine?’ I asked.
    ‘Oh, just a mild sedative. Bismuth, and a spot of morphia.’
    ‘Morphia!’ exclaimed Frances. ‘But you gave him morphia too, Rona. You don’t think…?’
    ‘No, no,’ Rona answered impatiently. ‘That couldn’t have done him any harm. There was no morphia to speak of in the medicine.’ But she looked exceedingly worried all the same.
    There was rather an awkward little silence.
    ‘Well, I’ll run up and say good night to John,’ Frances remarked suddenly, and she did so, literally.
    ‘No respect for the profession, your wife,’ Glen commented humorously, ‘Never asked the patient’s doctor’s permission, you see.’
    We chatted desultorily during the five minutes that Frances was upstairs. Rona still looked worried and preoccupied; Glen was more concerned in wondering whether Angela would sufficiently recover from her prostration to offer us a drink before we went. It was past nine o’clock, and he had had a hard day and no food.
    Angela, however, did not appear, and the three of us left the house drinkless, Rona staying behind to keep an eye on the invalid. Glen walked down the lane with us but refused Frances’ invitation to come in and share our belated dinner. He was expecting another message and would have time for only a couple of mouthfuls at home.
    Frances came into my dressing-room as I was brushing my hair.
    ‘Douglas,’ she said, ‘Rona’s worried.’
    ‘I know she is.’ Privately I thought we could very well leave things to Glen, but the sex loyalty which afflicts even the most reasonable of women would have driven Frances to combat this if I had said so out loud.
    She did not need the provocation, however, for she went on at once. ‘I’d sooner trust to Rona than Glen.’
    Her tone was both defensive and pugnacious, so unusual a combination with Frances that I looked round in surprise.
    ‘Frances, what’s in your mind?’
    ‘I believe Rona’s afraid there was something wrong with that medicine.’
    ‘But she makes