Oh! the humiliation of possessing a frail body and a lot of disorganized nerves! When I got home Marigold, seeing that I was overtired, was all for putting me to bed then and there. I spurned the insulting proposal in language plain enough even to his wooden understanding. Sometimes his imperturbability exasperated me. I might just as well try to taunt a poker or sting a fire-shovel into resentment of personal abuse. "I'll see you hanged, drawn, and quartered before I'll go to bed," I declared. "Very good, sir." The gaunt wretch was carrying me. "But I think you might lie down for half an hour before dinner." He deposited me ignominiously on the bed and left the room. In about ten minutes Dr. Cliffe, my inveterate adversary who has kept life in me for many a year, came in with his confounded pink smiling face. "What's this I hear? Been overdoing it?" "What the deuce are you doing here?" I cried. "Go away. How dare you come when you're not wanted?" He grinned. "I'm wanted right enough, old man. The good Marigold's never at fault. He rang me up and I slipped round at once." "One of these days," said I, "I'll murder that fellow." He replied by gagging me with his beastly thermometer. Then he felt my pulse and listened to my heart and stuck his fingers into the corners of my eyes, so as to look at the whites; and when he was quite satisfied with himself--there is only one animal more self-complacent than your medical man in such circumstances, and that is a dog who has gorged himself with surreptitious meat--he ordained that I should forthwith go properly to bed and stay there and be perfectly quiet until he came again, and in the meanwhile swallow some filthy medicine which he would send round. "One of these days," said he, rebukingly, "instead of murdering your devoted Sergeant, you'll be murdering yourself, if you go on such lunatic excursions. Of course I'm shocked at hearing about Colonel Boyce, and I'm sorry for the poor lady, but why you should have been made to half kill yourself over the matter is more than I can understand." "I happen," said I, "to be his only intimate friend in the place." "You happen," he retorted, "to be a chronic invalid and the most infernal worry of my life." "You're nothing but an overbearing bully," said I. He grinned again. That is what I have to put up with. If I curse Marigold, he takes no notice. If I curse Cliffe, he grins. Yet what I should do without them, Heaven only knows. "God bless 'em both," said I, when my aching body was between the cool sheets.