You can leave him safely for twenty minutes or so." Branscombe slept steadily and quietly through the forenoon, and then woke, clear in mind, and, as the doctor anticipated, with an appetite.
He swallowed the meal prepared for him with considerably less pain than yesterday, and then, for the first time, recognised his nurse.
"Thank you, sir," said he; "have I been seedy long ?" "You were rather poorly yesterday, old fellow," said Railsford, "and you must keep very quiet now, and not talk." The patient evinced no desire to disobey either of these injunctions, and composed himself once more to sleep.
Before he awoke, a cab had driven into the courtyard and set down three passengers.

Two of them were Mr and Mrs Branscombe, the third was a trained nurse from London.
As they appeared on the scene, joined almost immediately by the doctor, Railsford quietly slipped away from the room and signalled to the cabman to stop and pick him up.

Five minutes later, he and his portmanteau were bowling towards the station, a day late for the boat-race.

But in other respects Mark Railsford was a happy man, and a better one for his night's vigil in the Valley of the Shadow of Death..