room, with its pictures and
electric lights, "but I want you to take it at what it has been worth
to me ever since I came out of the hospital."

Lincott took Helling into his dining-room. On a pedestal stood a great
silver vase, blazing its magnificence across the room.

"You see that?" he asked.

"Yes," said Helling.

"It was given to me by a patient. It must have cost at the least
L500."

Helling tapped the vase with his knuckles.

"Yes, sir, that's a present," he said enviously. "That _is_ a
present."

Lincott laughed and threw up the window.

"You can pitch it out into the street if you like. By the side of your
coin it's muck."

Lincott keeps the coin. He points out that Helling was fifty-three at
the time that he gave him this present, and that the operation was one
which any practitioner could have performed.

THE FIFTH PICTURE.

Lady Tamworth felt unutterably bored. The sensation of lassitude, even
in its less acute degrees, was rare with her; for she possessed a
nature of so fresh a buoyancy that she was able, as a rule, to extract
diversion from any environment. Her mind took impressions with the
vivid clearness of a mirror, and also, it should be owned, with a
mirror's transient objectivity. To-day, however, the mirror was
clouded. She looked out of the window; a level row of grey houses
frowned at her across the street. She looked upwards; a grey pall of
cloud swung over the rooftops. The interior of the room appeared to
her even less inviting than the street. It was the afternoon of the
first drawing-room, and a _debutante_ was exhibiting herself to her
friends. She stood in the centre, a figure from a Twelfth-Night cake,
amidst a babble of congratulations, and was plainly occupied in a
perpetual struggle to conceal her moments of enthusiasm beneath a
crust of deprecatory languor.

The spectacle would have afforded choice entertainment to Lady
Tamworth, had she viewed it in the company of a sympathetic companion.
Solitary appreciation of the humorous, however, only induced in her
a yet more despondent mood. The tea seemed tepid; the conversation
matched the tea. Epigrams without point, sallies void of wit, and
cynicisms innocent of the sting of an apt application floated about
her on a ripple of unintelligent laughter. A phrase of Mr. Dale's
recurred to her mind, "Hock and seltzer with the sparkle out of it;"
so he had stigmatised the style and she sadly thanked him for the
metapho