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586 THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP
yourself, little Brandon ! I must have you sent back to lie down
on your bed. Take her up, Philip, to the little room next mine ;
and order her to lie down and be as quiet as a mouse. You are
not to move till I give you leave, Brandon—mind that ; and come
back to us, Firmin, or we shall have the patients coming."
So Philip led away this poor Little Sister ; and trembling, and
clinging to his arm, she returned to the room assigned to her.
" She wants to be alone with him," the Doctor said ; and he
spoke a brief word or two of that strange delusion under which the
little woman laboured, that this was her dead child come back to her.
" I know that is in her mind," Goodenough said ; " she never
got over that brain fever in which I found her. If I were to
swear her on the book, and say, 'Brandon, don't you believe he
is your son alive again ?' she would not dare to say no. She will
leave him everything she has got. I only gave her so much less
than that scoundrel's bill yesterday, because I knew she would like
to contribute her own share. It would have offended her mortally
to have been left out of the subscription. They like to sacrifice
themselves. Why, there are women in India who, if not allowed
to roast with their dead husbands, would die of vexation." And
by this time Mr. Philip came striding back into the room again,
rubbing a pair of very red eyes.
" Long ere this, no doubt, that drunken ruffian is sobered, and
knows that the bill is gone. He is likely enough to accuse her
of the robbery," says the Doctor.
" Suppose," says Philip's other friend, " I had put a pistol to
your head, and was going to shoot you, and the Doctor took the
pistol out of my hand, and flung it into the sea, would you help
me to prosecute the Doctor for robbing me of the pistol ?"
" You don't suppose it will be a pleasure to me to pay that
bill ?" said Philip. " I said, if a certain bill were presented to me,
purporting to be accepted by Philip Firmin, I would pay it. But
if that scoundrel, Hunt, only says that he had such a bill, and has
lost it ; I will cheerfully take my oath that I have never signed
any bill at all—and they can't find Brandon guilty of stealing a
thing which never existed."
" Let us hope, then, that the bill was not in duplicate !"
And to this wish all three gentlemen heartily said Amen !
And now the Doctor's door-bell began to be agitated by arriving
patients. His dining-room was already full of them. The Little
Sister must lie still, and the discussion of her affairs must be
deferred to a more convenient hour; and Philip and his friend
agreed to reconnoitre the house in Thornhaugh Street, and see if
anything had happened since its mistress had left it.