namental and
sparkling than his truths.
Mrs. W. Keyse would have took a situation as General, and glad, but there
were family reasons against that. She had broke down and cried somethink
dreadful on her William's shabby tweed shoulder the morning he went out to
answer the West End Doctor's advertisement. He kissed her and told her to
keep her hair on, but she was so hysterical that he was fair afryde to
leave 'er. So he took her along, and his good Angel must have suggested
that.
Cripps!--when the manservant in plain clothes said, "Step this way,
upstairs please"--W. Keyse and wife having applied at the area-door--"and
Dr. Saxham will see you," the name, not having been mentioned in the
advertisement, which gave only the address and an initial, imparted to
both an electrical shock of surprise. They had looked a very small and
very shabby and very lost and lonely little couple under those
high-moulded ceilings and upon the Turkey carpets that covered the
polished parquet of the handsomely-furnished and well-appointed
consulting-room that the practitioner who had caved in through South
African Gold-Mines had considered an adequate setting for his bald-browed
and portly presence. Now both curved backbones assumed the perpendicular,
and their wide Cockney mouths were wreathed in joyful smiles.
The man sitting in the Sheraton armchair at the writing-table that matched
it, the man with the black head and square pale face and heavy muscular
shoulders, who looked up from among his papers and notebooks with the
receiver of a telephone at his ear, rose to his feet, and came to them
with a kind, outstretched hand. Saxham never wasted a word or forgot a
face. And here were two faces from Gueldersdorp. He shook the hands that
belonged to them, and said in his curt way:
"How are you, Mrs. Keyse? And you, Keyse? You may guess when I heard that
somebody had called to answer my advertisement I hardly imagined that two
old patients had dropped down on me from the skies!"
The young woman stared at Saxham with her mouth agape and the tears
trickling down her hollow cheeks. The young man swallowed something with a
violent effort, and blurted out:
"Lumme, Doctor! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out of the Other
Shop--an' landin' in the middle of New Jerusalem! Weeks along"--he picked
up the shabby bowler that had dropped upon the Turkey carpet--"for weeks
along I've been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi' me! Now I
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