Hank returns shortly after - thankfully once Erik's cigarette is extinguished, ashes scattered - and gruffly confirms that Charles has pneumonia.

Erik fights down all the images that rise to his mind of friends and relatives labouring to breathe and nods curtly. Hank takes up sentry duty silently, freeing Erik to return to Charles and check on him.

"What did Hank say?" Erik says as he enters the study, maintaining the polite fiction that the whole mansion doesn't know their professor is sick to his bones.