"Does Alfred have to stay up here doing a chambermaid's work?" demanded the man of the house fretfully. "My God! Can you or can't you manage--between your teas and card parties--to get someone else to put this room in order?" He ended in a long moan, and dropped his head again into the pillows. "Do you know what he wants?" Rachael asked the man in a quick whisper. "Go down and get it, then!" "I'm co-o-old!" said the man in the bed, going into a sudden and violent chill. "I've caught my death, I think. Joe made a punch--some sort of an eggnog--eggs were bad, I think. I'm poisoned. The stuff was rotten!" He sank mumbling back into the pillows. Rachael, who had been hanging his coat carefully in the big closet adjoining his room, came to the bedside and laid her cool fingers on his burning forehead. If irrepressible distaste was visible in her face, it was only a faint reflection of the burning resentment in her heart. "You've got a fever, Clarence," she announced quietly. The answer was only a furious and incoherent burst of denunciation; the patient was in utter physical discomfort, and could not choose his terms. Rachael--not for the first nor the hundredth time--felt within her an impulse to leave him here, leave him to outwear his miseries without her help. But this she could not do without throwing the house into an uproar. Clarence at these times had no consideration for public opinion, had no dignity, no self-control. Much better satisfy him, as she had done so many times before, and keep a brave face to the world. So she placed a hot-water bag against his cold feet, went to her own room adjoining to borrow a fluffy satin comforter with which to augment his own bed covering, laid an icy towel upon his throbbing forehead, and when Alfred presently appeared with a decanter of whisky, Rachael watched her husband eagerly gulp down a glass of it without uttering one word of the bitter protest that rose to her lips. She was not a prude, with the sublime inconsistency of most women whose lives are made the darker for drink; she did not identify herself with any movement toward prohibition, or refuse the cocktails, the claret, and the wine that were customarily served at her own and at other people's dinner-tables. But she hated coarseness in any form, she hated contact with the sodden, self-pitying, ugly animal that Clarence Breckenridge became under the influence of drink.