Ellida looked at him incredulously. But eventually her face cleared. “Oh, about Peter?” she said. “I was beginning to think you’d got an inquest in the house....” And suddenly she touched Dudley Leicester vigorously on the arm. “Come! Get him up from wherever he is,” she said, with a good-humoured vivacity. “Katya’s more important than Peter, and I’ve got the largest number of things to tell him in the shortest possible time.” Dudley Leicester, in his dull bewilderment, was veering round upon his straddled legs, gazing first helplessly at the bell beside the chimney-piece and then at the door. Even if he hadn’t been already bewildered, he would not have known very well how properly to summon a friend who was talking to a servant of his own. Did you ring, or did you go to the top of the stairs and call? But his bewilderment was cut short by the appearance of Grimshaw himself, and at the sight of his serene face just lighting up with a little smile of astonishment and pleasure, Dudley Leicester’s panic vanished as suddenly and irrationally as it had fallen on him. He even smiled, while Ellida Langham said, with a sharp, quick little sound, “Boo!” in answer to Robert’s exclamation of “Ellida!” But Grimshaw took himself up quickly, and said: “Ah! I know you’ve some final message for me, and you went round to my rooms, and Jervis told you I’d come on here.” She was quite a different Ellida from the plaintive lady in the Park. Her lips were parted, her eyes sparkled, and she held her arms behind her back as if she were expecting a dog to jump up at her. “Ah! You think you know everything, Mr. Toto,” she said; “but, _je vous le donne en mille_, you don’t know what I’ve come to tell you.” “I know it’s one of two things,” Grimshaw said, smiling: “Either Kitty’s spoken, or else Katya has.” “Oh, she’s more than spoken,” Ellida cried out. “She’s coming. In three days she’ll be here.” Robert Grimshaw reflected for a long time. “You did what you said you would?” he asked at last. “I did what I said I would,” she repeated. “I appealed to her sense of duty. I said that, if she was so good in the treatment of obscure nervous diseases--and you know the head-doctor-man over there said she was as good a man as himself--it was manifestly her duty, her duty to mother’s memory, to take charge of mother’s only descendant--that’s Kitty--and this is her answer: She’s coming--she’s coming with a patient from Philadelphia.... Oh! she’s coming. Katya’s coming again. Won’t it make everything different?” She pulled Robert Grimshaw by the buttonhole over to the window, and began to speak in little sibilant whispers. And it came into Dudley Leicester’s head to think that, if Katya Lascarides was so splendid in the treatment of difficult cases, she might possibly be able to advise him as to some of the obscure maladies from which he was certain that he suffered.