With eager, clumsy fingers she undid the wrapping and disclosed a round green box decorated with the picture of a naked gentleman, standing in front of something that looked like an electric shock.

“There are six powders altogether,” she told them excitedly, “but after the first, you feel a marked improvement. ‘Fulvitavolts.’ Hundreds of letters, Derry, from physicians, surgeons, politicians—lots of politicians, Derry. They all swear by it. Their symptoms were precisely the same as yours. Honestly.”

She looked pathetically eager. She was so awkward and vehement with her thick hands, her watery eyes, and her enormous nose.

“You don’t know what my symptoms are, Ruth.”

“Indeed I do. Violent abdominal seizures. Cicely—do read it all.”

Lady O’Callaghan took the box and looked at one of the folded cachets.

“I’ll give him one to-night, Ruth,” she promised, exactly as though she was humouring an excitable child.

“That’s topping!” Ruth had a peculiar trick of using unreal slang. “I’m most awfully bucked. And in the morning all those horrid pains will have flown away.” She made a sort of blundering, ineffectual gesture. She beamed at them.

“And now, old girl, I’m afraid you’ll have to fly away yourself,” said O’Callaghan with a desperate effort to answer roguishness with brotherly playfulness. “I think I hear Phillips arriving.”

“Come along, Ruth,” said his wife. “We must make ourselves scarce. Good night again, Derek.”

Ruth laid a gnarled finger on her lips and tiptoed elaborately to the door. There she turned and blew him a kiss.

He heard them greet Sir John Phillips briefly and go upstairs. In his relief at being rid of his sister, O’Callaghan felt a wave of good-fellowship for John Phillips. Phillips was an old friend. It would be a relief to tell him how ill he felt—to learn how ill he really was. Perhaps Phillips would give him something that would help him along for the time being. He already felt a little better. Very likely it was a trifling thing after all. Phillips would know. He turned to the door with an air of pleased expectancy. Nash opened the door and came in.

“Sir John Phillips, sir.”

Phillips entered the room.

He was an extremely tall man with an habitual stoop. His eyes, full-lidded and of a peculiarly light grey, were piercingly bright. No one ever saw him without his single eye-glass and there was a rumour that he wore it ribbonless while he operated. His nose was a beak and his under lip jutted out aggressively. He was unmarried, and unmoved, so it was said, by the general tendency among his women patients to fall extravagantly in love with him. Perhaps next to actors medical men profit most by the possession of that curious quality that people call “personality.” Sir John Phillips was, very definitely, a personage. His rudeness was more glamorously famous than his brilliant ability.

O’Callaghan moved towards him, his hand extended.