s
inquiry, poured their troubles into his ears, as the girl-wife upstairs
had tried to do.

When the old man turned to face him in the sunlight, his boots soiled
with dust and manure, his long upper lip feeling about over the lower
lip and its shaggy growth of beard like some sea-monster feeling for its
prey, the Young Doctor had a sensation of rancour. His mind flashed to
that upstairs room, where a comely captive creature was lying not an
arm's length from the coats and trousers and shabby waistcoats of this
barbarian. Somehow that row of tenantless clothes, and the top-boots,
greased with tallow, standing against the wall, were more characteristic
of the situation than the old land-leviathan himself, blinking his
beady, greenish eyes at the Young Doctor. That blinking was a repulsive
characteristic; it was like serpents gulping live things.

"What's the matter with her?" the old man asked, jerking his head
towards the upper window.

The Young Doctor explained quickly the immediate trouble, and then
added:

"But it would not have taken hold of her so if she was not run down. She
is not in a condition to resist. When her system exhausts, it does not
refill, as it were."

"What sort of dictionary talk is that? Run down--here?" The old man
sniffed the air like an ancient sow. "Run down--in this life, with the
best of food, warm weather, and more ozone than a sailor gets at sea!
It's an insult to Jehovah, such nonsense."

"Mr. Mazarine," rejoined the Young Doctor with ominous determination in
his eye, "you know a good deal, I should think, about spring wheat and
fall ploughing, about making sows fat, or burning fallow land--that's
your trade, and I shouldn't want to challenge you on it all; or you know
when to give a horse bran-mash, or a heifer salt-petre, but--well, I
know my job in the same way. They will tell you, about here, that I have
a kind of hobby for keeping people from digging and crawling into their
own graves. That's my business, and the habit of saving human life,
because you're paid for it, becomes in time a habit of saving human life
for its very own sake. I warn you--and perhaps it's a matter of some
concern to you--Mrs. Mazarine is in a bad way."

Resentful and incredulous, the old man was about to speak, but the Young
Doctor made an arresting gesture, and added:

"She has very little strength to go on with. She ought to be plump; her
pulses ought to beat hard; her cheeks ought to be rosy; she