Those worried but faintly amused eyes were on me. “Been hearing quite a lot about you lately. Nurses would have your _dossier_ complete by now if they could understand English. You seem to have put your foot in it somewhere. Rather sorry for you if....” This bantering ... medical bantering! Only doctors dare do it. “Well, how are we to-day?” But by paying close attention to the game I had scored one point. She was delirious. So far, delirious. Then ... “if!” “Masters,” I said, “are you telling me that she is dying?” “Mm ...” he muttered impatiently, and as he jumped up from his chair the rough brown great-coat seemed to fill the dingy lodge. It smelt of England, that coat. And, protruding from it, that sharp, naked, weary face with the worried eyes.... “Look here, Masters--” “Here you are,” he muttered. I could not understand why he muttered. “Here you are” until I found a cigarette in one hand and one of those wretched spirit-lighters in the other. A man without conviction even in his ability to strike a match.... “Known her for years,” he muttered towards his feet. “At Deauville that year ... terrible for her. Poor child....” “Masters, you said Donna Guelãra might die. You know you did. But she didn’t, did she?” He looked at me sharply. “If only she’d help herself, lift a finger to help herself! That’s what beats a man. Doesn’t lift one finger, she doesn’t.” “Oh!” I said, trying to look reasonable. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, accommodate myself to the idea of Iris dying. “I suppose this is the crisis, is it, Masters?” The rough great-coat gave one vindictive flounce, filled the room. “Crisis! The way you people talk of crisis this and crisis that! Hear a word once and stick to it through life! ‘When does the crisis pass?’ There is no ‘crisis’ in most of these infernal things. Malaria, pneumonia, a few others--yes, crisis, know where you are. But in these things the patient just continues ill, two, three, four weeks, might live, might not. Lysis, not crisis. Crisis!” “Sorry. Lysis....” “Oh, here!” He suddenly began fumbling in an ancient pocket-book, from which he extracted a small folded piece of paper. “Might interest you,” he muttered. Scrawled in pencil across the slip of paper were what looked like two names. That indecipherable scrawl! At last I made out the two names: Hilary’s and mine. “She said, should either of these two happen somehow to hear I am ill and call, just be nice to them, please. Her very words....” “Oh!” I said. And I went on staring at the slip of paper. It was a rather grubby slip of paper. And those two scrawled names were like a faint cry of loneliness. “Known her for years,” Masters was muttering. “Nice! First tells me not to tell any one, then to be ‘nice’ to you two....”