distinguished consideration.'"

"And what's your particular poison for him?" asked Dicky, with his eyes
on the Cholera Hospital a few hundred yards away.

"I don't know. If he's punished in the ordinary way it will only make
matters worse, as the Mudir says. Something's needed that will play our
game and turn the tables on the reptile too."

"A sort of bite himself with his own fangs, eh?" Dicky seemed only idly
watching the moving figures by the hospital.

"Yes, but what is it? I can't inoculate him with bacilli. That's what'd
do the work, I fancy."

"Pocket your fancy, Fielding," answered Dicky. "Let me have a throw."

"Go on. If you can't hit it off, it's no good, for my head doesn't think
these days: it only sees, and hears, and burns."

Dicky eyed Fielding keenly, and then, pouring out some whiskey for
himself, put the bottle on the floor beside him, casually as it were.
Then he said, with his girlish laugh, not quite so girlish these days:
"I've got his sentence pat--it'll meet the case, or you may say, 'Cassio,
never more be officer of mine.'"

He drew over a piece of paper lying on the piano--for there was a piano
on the Amenhotep, and with what seemed an audacious levity Fielding
played in those rare moments when they were not working or sleeping; and
Fielding could really play! As Dicky wrote he read aloud in a kind of