"I am thinking," he said. "Don't interrupt me; I want to be alone for an hour or so."
"But you must have something to eat," I insisted. "You will lose your strength if you don't."
"Quite right," he admitted. "Send me up some soup, and let me have pencil and paper."
He was supplied with both. When I went up an hour later, he was smoking a cigarette and writing.
"I do not wish," he said, "to be worried with any more doctors. It is only a farce, and I have little time to spare."
"Nonsense!" I answered. "Rust declares that there is very little the matter with you. He has sent for a friend to come and have a look at you."
A little gesture of impatience escaped him.
"My dear Courage," he said, "I am obliged to you for all this care; but I am quite sure that, in your inner consciousness, you realize as I do that it is sheer waste of time."
He drew his dressing-gown a little closer around him. The hollows under his eyes seemed to have grown deeper since the morning.
"I am fairly run to earth," he continued. "Even these few hours of life I owe to my enemies. They hope to profit by them, of course. If you are the man I think you are, they will be mistaken. But don't waste my time with doctors."
He began to write again. I made some perfunctory remark which he entirely ignored. Just then I was called away. He watched my departure with obvious relief.
I was told that a stranger was waiting to see me in the library. My first thought was of the doctor. When I arrived there, I found a young man whose face was familiar, but whom I could not at once place. Then, like a flash, I remembered. It was the younger of the two men who had forced their way into my room at the Hotel Universal.
Now I was in no very good humor for dealing with these gentry. I had a distinct inclination to take him by the collar of the coat and throw him out. I fancy that he divined from my face how I was feeling, for he began hastily to explain his presence.
"I am very sorry to be an intruder, Mr. Courage," he said in his slow, precise English. "I had no wish to come at all. We were willing to leave you undisturbed. But we do not understand why you have sent for a doctor from London--and especially Professor Kauppmann!"
I looked at him deliberately. He was wearing English clothes--a dark tweed suit, ill-cut, and apparently ready-made; but the foreigner was written large all over him, from the tie of his bow to his narrow patent boots. His eyes were fixed anxiously upon me--large black eyes with long, feminine eyelashes. I think that if he had not been under the shelter of my own roof, I must have laid violent hands upon him.