"This place is turned into a wilderness--" he went on and then, staggering, caught at the Doctor's thick arm. In an instant the Big Doctor had his other arm round Dick's shoulders, and held him firm. "Stand still, Major, it's nothing! You'll be all right in a minute!" he said, meeting Dick's frightened eyes with reassuring steadiness. "The sun's very hot. It's only a touch of giddiness--" He stood, a great rock of support, uttering leisurely words of consolation, while he quietly slipped one hand down the Major's arm, until his broad, perceptive finger-tips could feel the faint pulse jerking under their pressure. Dick's colour crept back, and the veins, that had shown blue on the sudden yellow of his cheek, began to lose their vividness. "That's more like it!" said the Doctor, tranquilly. "Do you sit quite here for a minute, now, and I'll go get you a drop of something from our friend, Mr. Evans, that'll do you no harm!" He established his patient on a garden seat, and left him, moving slowly until he knew he was no longer in sight; then he swung into the house, with swift strides that would have compelled a smaller man to run, if he were to keep level with him. "Poor old lad!" he thought, compassionately; yet, blended with the compassion, was the half-unconscious triumph of strong middle-age at sight of the failure of a senior. "That's the first knock. He'll want to mind himself from this out--the next one might hit him harder." CHAPTER XXIII The back stairs at Mount Music were old and precipitous. To descend them at high noon demanded circumspection at night, when the armies of the cockroaches were abroad; and marauding rats came flopping up and down them, upon their unlawful occasions, only that man of iron, Robert Evans, was proof to their terrors. Christian, even though inured from childhood to the backstairs, held her habit skirt high, and thanked, heaven for her riding-boots, as she made her way down the worn stone steps, at some half-past four of a September morning. Mount Music was one of the many houses of its period that, with, to quote Mrs. Dixon, "the globe of Ireland to build over," had elected to bestow its menials in dark and complex basements. Christian and her candle traversed the long maze of underground passages. The smell of past cooking was in the air, the black and evil glitter of cockroaches twinkled on the walls on either hand. This was the horrible part of subbing, thought Christian, and told herself that nothing but the thought of seeing the _début_ of Dido, the puppy that she had walked, would compensate her for facing the cockroaches.