id not choose to meet his boon companions
again, but he stood for full ten minutes, with one of Dr. Sturk's
military cloaks about him, under the village tree, directing the
double-fire of his spectacles down the street, with an incensed
steadiness, unrewarded, unrelieved. Not a glimmer of a link; not a
distant rumble of a coach-wheel. It was a clear, frosty night, and one
might hear a long way.

If any of the honest townsfolk had accidentally lighted upon that
muffled, glaring image under the dark old elm, I think he would have
mistaken it for a ghost, or something worse. The countenance at that
moment was not prepossessing.

Mr. Dangerfield was not given to bluster, and never made a noise; but
from his hollow jaws he sighed an icy curse towards Dublin, which had a
keener edge than all the roaring blasphemies of Donnybrook together;
and, with another shadow upon his white face, he re-entered the house.

'He'll not come to-night, Ma'am,' he said with a cold abruptness.

'Oh, thank Heaven!--that is--I'm so afraid--I mean about the operation.'

Dangerfield, with his hands in his pockets, said nothing. There was a
sneer on his face, white and dark, somehow. That was all. Was he
baffled, and was Dr. Sturk, after all, never to regain his speech?

At half-past ten o'clock, Mr. Dangerfield abandoned hope. Had it been
Dr. Pell, indeed, it would have been otherwise. But Black Dillon had not
a patient; his fame was in the hospitals. There was nothing to detain
him but his vices, and five hundred pounds to draw him to Chapelizod. He
had not come. He must be either brained in a row, or drunk under a
table. So Mr. Dangerfield took leave of good Mrs. Sturk, having told her
in case the doctor should come, to make him wait for his arrival before
taking any measures, and directing that he should be sent for
immediately.

So Mr. Dangerfield got into his white surtout silently in the hall, and
shut the door quickly after him, and waited, a grim sentry, under the
tree, with his face towards Dublin. Father Time had not blunted the
white gentleman's perceptions, touched his ear with his numb fingers, or
blown the smoke of his tobacco-pipe into his eyes. He was keen of eye,
sharp of hearing; but neither sight nor sound rewarded him, and so he
turned, after a few minutes, and glided away, like a white ghost, toward
the Brass Castle.

In less than five minutes after, the thunder of a coach shook Dr.
Sturk's windows, followed by a rousin