For answer, Adela rang the bell herself. Her aunt was pretending to look
out of the window.

"Will you go and ask your master," said Harry, when Emma made her
appearance, "to be so kind as come here for a moment?"

The poor colonel--an excellent soldier, a severe master, with the highest
notions of authority and obedience, found himself degraded by his own
conduct, as other autocrats have proved before, into a temporizing
incapable. It was the more humiliating that he was quite aware in his own
honest heart that it was jealousy of Harry that had brought him into this
painful position. But he obeyed the summons at once; for wherever there
was anything unpleasant to be done, there, with him, duty assumed the
sterner command. As soon as he entered the room, Harry, without giving
time for anyone else to determine the course of the conference, said:

"There has been some mistake, Colonel Cathcart, between Dr. Wade and
myself, which has already done Miss Cathcart no good. As I find her very
feverish, though not by any means alarmingly ill, I must, as her medical
attendant, insist that _no_ one come into her room but yourself or her
maid."

Every one present perfectly understood this; and however, in other
circumstances, the colonel might have resented the tone of authority with
which Harry spoke, he was compelled, for his daughter's sake, to yield;
and he afterwards justified Harry entirely. Mrs. Cathcart walked out of
the room with her neck invisible from behind. The colonel sat down by the
fire. Harry wrote his prescription on the half sheet from which Dr. Wade
had torn his; and then saying that he would call in the evening, took his