Miss Silverton lowered the pistol, sank into a chair, and burst into tears.
“I think you’re the meanest man I ever met!” she sobbed. “You know perfectly well the bang would send me into a fit!”
“In that case,” said Archie, relieved, “cheerio, good luck, pip-pip, toodle-oo, and good-bye-ee! I’ll be shifting!”
“Yes, you will!” cried Miss Silverton, energetically, recovering with amazing swiftness from her collapse. “Yes, you will, I by no means suppose! You think, just because I’m no champion with a pistol, I’m helpless. You wait! Percy!”
“My name is not Percy.”
“I never said it was. Percy! Percy, come to muzzer!”
There was a creaking rustle from behind the arm-chair. A heavy body flopped on the carpet. Out into the room, heaving himself along as though sleep had stiffened his joints, and breathing stertorously through his tilted nose, moved the fine bulldog. Seen in the open, he looked even more formidable than he had done in his basket.
“Guard him, Percy! Good dog, guard him! Oh, heavens! What’s the matter with him?”
And with these words the emotional woman, uttering a wail of anguish, flung herself on the floor beside the animal.
Percy was, indeed, in manifestly bad shape. He seemed quite unable to drag his limbs across the room. There was a curious arch in his back, and, as his mistress touched him, he cried out plaintively,
“Percy! Oh, what IS the matter with him? His nose is burning!”
Now was the time, with both sections of the enemy’s forces occupied, for Archie to have departed softly from the room. But never, since the day when at the age of eleven he had carried a large, damp, and muddy terrier with a sore foot three miles and deposited him on the best sofa in his mother’s drawing-room, had he been able to ignore the spectacle of a dog in trouble.
“He does look bad, what!”
“He’s dying! Oh, he’s dying! Is it distemper? He’s never had distemper.”
Archie regarded the sufferer with the grave eye of the expert. He shook his head.
“It’s not that,” he said. “Dogs with distemper make a sort of snifting noise.”
“But he IS making a snifting noise!”
“No, he’s making a snuffling noise. Great difference between snuffling and snifting. Not the same thing at all. I mean to say, when they snift they snift, and when they snuffle they–as it were– snuffle. That’s how you can tell. If you ask ME”–he passed his hand over the dog’s back. Percy uttered another cry. “I know what’s the matter with him.”
“A brute of a man kicked him at rehearsal. Do you think he’s injured internally?”
“It’s rheumatism,” said Archie. “Jolly old rheumatism. That’s all that’s the trouble.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“But what can I do?”
“Give him a good hot bath, and mind and dry him well. He’ll have a good sleep then, and won’t have any pain. Then, first thing to- morrow, you want to give him salicylate of soda.”
“I’ll never remember that.”-“I’ll write it down for you. You ought to give him from ten to twenty grains three times a day in an ounce of water. And rub him with any good embrocation.”
“And he won’t die?”
“Die! He’ll live to be as old as you are!-I mean to say–”
“I could kiss you!” said Miss Silverton, emotionally.
Archie backed hastily.
“No, no, absolutely not! Nothing like that required, really!”
“You’re a darling!”
“Yes. I mean no. No, no, really!”
“I don’t know what to say. What can I say?”
“Good night,” said Archie.
“I wish there was something I could do! If you hadn’t been here, I should have gone off my head!”
A great idea flashed across Archie’s brain.
“Do you really want to do something?”
“Anything!”
“Then I do wish, like a dear sweet soul, you would pop straight back to New York to-morrow and go on with those rehearsals.”
Miss Silverton shook her head.
“I can’t do that!”
“Oh, right-o! But it isn’t much to ask, what!”
“Not much to ask! I’ll never forgive that man for kicking Percy!”
“Now listen, dear old soul. You’ve got the story all wrong. As a matter of fact, jolly old Benham told me himself that he has the greatest esteem and respect for Percy, and wouldn’t have kicked him for the world. And, you know it was more a sort of push than a kick. You might almost call it a light shove. The fact is, it was beastly dark in the theatre, and he was legging it sideways for some reason or other, no doubt with the best motives, and unfortunately he happened to stub his toe on the poor old bean.”