For any sake don't say a word or give a look of pity or sympathy. I shall bring a servant--may I?--who will look after me. I don't want to give you trouble, and I intend to take none myself. Mind, I trust you to telegraph "No" quite simply if you don't want me. There was only one reply possible to this, and, indeed, Merivale had no inclination to give any other. Of course Philip was welcome; he would very likely have proposed this himself had not this letter come so opportunely, and the telegram in reply was genuinely cordial. Poor old Philip, who used to be so happy in the way in which probably a locomotive engine is happy, groomed and cared for, and only required to do exactly that which it loves doing, namely, being strong and efficient, and exercising its strength and speed. Yet though Tom's welcome of him was so genuine, he shrank inwardly, though he did not confess this even to himself, from what lay before him, for he hated misery and unhappiness--hated the sight or proximity of it, he even thought that it was bad for anybody to see it, but if on this point his attitude was inconsistent with the warmth of his telegram, the inconsistency was wholly human and amiable. On the other hand, though he was by no means of a proselytising nature, there was here, almost forced upon him, a fine test case. He believed himself very strongly in the infectious character of human emotions; fear seemed to him more catching than the smallpox, and worry ran through a household even as does an epidemic of influenza. And if this which he so profoundly believed was true, that truth must hold also about the opposite of all these bad things; they, too, must be infectious also, unless one chose to draw the unthinkable conclusion that evil was contagious, whereas good was not communicable by the same processes. That could not be, the spiritual microbes must, as far as theory or deduction could be trusted to supply an almost certain analogy, correspond to the microbes of the material world; there must in fact be in the spiritual world, if these microbes of suffering and misery were there, much vaster armies of microbes that produced in man all the things that made life worth living; battalions of happiness-germs must be there, of germs that were forever spreading and swarming in their ceaseless activity of building-up and regenerating man, of battling with the other legions whose work was to destroy and depress and kill. And if there was anything in his belief--a belief on which he would gladly have staked his life--that joy, health, life were ever gaining ground and triumphing over their lethal foes, then it followed that the germs of all things that were good were more potent than those that were evil if their armies were mobilised.