With infinite gallantry, he filled another kettle and set it on the stove.
Cuff watched him curiously from the door. Sometimes it seemed to him that Bill did the craziest things. But Bill usually knew what he was doing, and ten places were ten places. Cuff decided not to make the comment he had intended to make.
Cassie was not so reticent.
Steering Leonidas away from the stove, she backed him into a corner of the dining room and expressed herself thoroughly.
“Bill, you’ve bowled them over, and you can eat out for the next year on the strength of all this bowing and scraping, but if you don’t stop, they’ll just never leave! And we’ve got to get them out of here! Will you stop being so damned charming, and think of a way out? For the love of heaven, will you do something? Can’t you throw a fit?”
“I am in constant communication,” Leonidas said, “with my old friend Dr. Livingston, who advised against fits. They’d rush me to the hospital, Cassie, and where would we be then? So—”
“What’s the matter with your voice?” Cassie asked suspiciously.
“I’m afraid,” Leonidas said, “that I am on the verge of a severe bout of fever. It requires absolute quiet, and my special pills—”
Cassie beamed. “I see! Will aspirin do?”
“But put them in a plain envelope,” Leonidas said. “Estelle Otis is getting that scurrilous, skeptical look in her eye. Hurry, Cassie. Stand by.”
He marched into the living room, and with a bow, accepted a cup of tea from the hand of Mrs. Tudbury. He sipped at it once, and nodded graciously at her inquiry regarding its strength.
A moment later, the babble had stopped.
The Tuesday Club, pale with horror to the last girl, stared down at the mulberry broadloom and at the prone figure of Leonidas.
Just the suspicion of a froth had appeared at the corner of his mouth, which was working in a manner later described by Mrs. Tudbury as hideous. Even Estelle Otis accepted that mouth-working as genuine, and it was. The combination of laundry soap from the kitchen sink and tea from the Tuesday Club urns, Leonidas thought, was enough to work the oral cavity of a bronze statue.
Cassie pushed breathlessly through the circle and knelt down beside him. Her agitation was not acting, either. It was real. Unable to find her own handbag, she had been forced to dash upstairs through the crowd to the medicine closet.
“Oh!” Cassie said. “He warned me, and I tried to warn you when you came, but you just barged right in without listening! It’s that terrible Manila fever. Strikes without the slightest warning. Get me cold water, somebody, and rubber gloves from the kitchen. Quick. And stand back. He told me just what to do. I’ve got his pills right here in this envelope. And don’t be afraid of the froth. It’s perfectly all right unless it happens to touch you.”
The circle instantly widened.
“Get a doctor!” Estelle said.
“At once,” Mrs. Tudbury added. “Call Dr. Strauss at once!”
Cassie had been waiting for that, and she had an answer ready.
“No, Dr. Livingston is on his way,” she said. “He’s spending the night here, and he ought to be here any minute. We expected him on the five-two. Tropical fevers are his specialty.” She drew on the rubber gloves that someone held out. “It’s all this excitement. Excitement and noise. I was afraid it would be too much, but he said no.”
“Did he really?” Mrs. Tudbury said. “He seemed so pleased, and so charming!”
“He thought it was dear of you to come,” Cassie opened Leonidas’s mouth and slipped an aspirin between his lips, which caused his mouth to work even more violently. “He was so pleased. He asked me if I thought you’d like him to lecture on his trip, and world conditions. He was nearly bombed, you know. That’s half the reason for this fever. Noise makes it come back. Where’s that water?”
Leonidas, who yearned to take the entire glass of water at one gulp, consoled himself with the thin trickle that Cassie poured between his teeth.
“It’s close in here,” Cassie said. “Open the terrace doors. Wide. He ought to have air.”
Mindful of the Tuesday Club’s reaction to drafts, Cassie had been cherishing those doors in her mind like a thirteenth trump. A good blast of frigid arctic air from the predicted cold wave ought to send the girls flying.
But the group just moved a little to one side.
“Fine! If we just leave those open—the poor man!” Cassie decided to try another tack. “He’s going to be so terribly embarrassed when he comes to and learns that you’ve seen this!”
Everyone agreed that it was too bad, but no one seemed to have the slightest inclination’ to leave.
Cassie began to feel desperate.
“Where’s that man?” Estelle Otis asked. “That houseman person. Have him carry Leonidas upstairs/’
“He must not be moved!” Cassie wondered how much longer she could continue. “It’s practically fatal to move someone with Manila fever until after the first spasm has passed.”
She knew perfectly well that the instant Cuff left that door, Estelle and the judge and the others would go romping downstairs. A strip of adhesive tape would be no barrier to Tudbury’s Horse.
“Well, he’ll certainly get pneumonia, if he lies there in that draft,” Estelle said. “I think you should call a doctor. And a nurse. Not,” she sniffed, “not someone from a Turkish Bath. A real nurse.”
“My dear,” Cassie said bravely, “Dr. Livingston is not a Doctor of Divinity. Dr. Livingston has a nurse. He—”
“Who’s that?” Estelle pointed to the girl who had stepped through the terrace doors into the living room. “For goodness’ sakes! Who is she?”
Cassie, in a flash, mentally ticked off the details of gray suit, red curls, smart suede bag, and decided it was the girl. The girl on the train. The one Dow raved about. And Cassie didn’t blame him for raving. The girl
