Several women were in the "lounge," chattering like magpies in front of the fire. There were no men about. He went in and for ten minutes listened to the singing of his praises. Then, requesting a pitcher of hot water, he hobbled upstairs, politely declining not only the Misses Dowd's offer to bathe and bandage his heroic knee, but Miss Grady's bottle of witchhazel, Miss Miller's tube of Baume Analgesique and old Mrs. Nichols' infallible remedy for every ailment under the sun,--a flaxseed poultice. The first thing he did on entering his room was to open his trunk and deposit therein the shiny object he had recovered from its hiding-place under the tree-seat. Before hanging his hat on the clothes-tree in the corner of the room, he thoughtfully examined the bullet hole in the crown. "Thirty-eight calibre, all right," he reflected. Poking his forefinger through the hole, he enlarged it to some extent. "More like a forty-four now," he said in a satisfied tone. Margaret Slattery brought up the hot water and some fresh firewood for his stove, in which the fire burned low. "Would you be liking a drink of whiskey, Mr. Thane?" she inquired, with a stealthy look over her shoulder. "You're all done up,--and half-frozen, I guess." "Whiskey?" he exclaimed. "There ain't no sitch animal," he lamented dolefully. "Miss Jennie's got some cooking brandy stuck away in the cellar," whispered Margaret. "We use it at Christmas time,--for the plum pudding, you know. I guess it's the same thing as whiskey, ain't it?" "Well, hardly. Still, I think I could do with a nip of it, Maggie." "I'll see what I can do," said Margaret, and departed. She did not return, for the very good reason that Miss Jennie apprehended her in the act of pouring something from a dark brown bottle into a brand new fruit jar. "What are you doing there, Maggie?" demanded Miss Dowd from the foot of the cellar stairs. Miss Slattery's back was toward her at the time. She was startled into hunching it slightly, as if expecting the lash of a whip,--an attitude of rigidity maintained during the brief period in which her heart suspended action altogether. "I'm--I'm getting some vinegar for Mr. Thane to gargle with, Miss Jennie," she mumbled. "He's--he's got a sore throat." "Let me smell that stuff, Maggie," said Miss Jennie sternly. One sniff was sufficient. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Margaret Slattery, leading a young man into temptation like this. You may be starting him on the road to perdition. It is just such things as this that--" "Oh, gosh!" exclaimed Margaret, recovering herself. "Don't you go thinking he's as good as all that. From what he was telling me at breakfast the other day, he used to make the round trip to purgatory every night or so,--only he said it was paradise. Keep your old brandy. He wouldn't like it anyway. Not him! He says he's swallered enough champagne to float the whole American Navy."