The sufferer was not more than twenty years old, if so much, but rather bald and grey. He looked waxen and wasted, with large hands, nose, and ears; showed himself glad unto tears for the kindness of the visit, and the diversion it afforded him, and indeed, out of weakness, did weep a little as he greeted the two and received the bouquet. His first words, uttered almost in a whisper, were with reference to the flowers, and he went on to talk about the European flower trade, and its ever-increasing proportions⁠—about the enormous exportation from the nurseries of Nice and Cannes, the shipments by trainload and post that went off daily from these places all over Europe; about the wholesale markets of Paris and Berlin, and the supplies for Russia. For he was a business man; his point of view was the commercial one, and would be so long as life remained to him. His father, a doll-manufacturer in Coburg, had sent him to England to be educated, he told them in a whisper, and there he had fallen ill. They had taken his fever for typhoid, and treated it accordingly, with liquid diet, which had much reduced him. Up here they had let him eat, and eat he had; in the sweat of his brow he had sat in his bed and tried to build himself up. But it was all too late, the intestinal tract was already involved.