ned to his place, and shook his finger at her warningly.
"And if you go to remind me as wot 'e were drunk when 'e done wot 'e
did----" He looked portentous warnings.

"I never would. Oh, William!"

"Mind as you never do, that's all!... I tried to thank 'im then," went on
W. Keyse, "an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im agyne at the
Hospital--an' e' wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is
own doorstep, an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is--Wait!
When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in the
Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad syved the life of a
Louse, an' 'ow the Louse laid out to do somethin' to pay the Lion
back...."

"I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse, "But it was a
mouse"--she repressed a shudder--"an' not the--thing you said."

"Mouse or Louse, it means the syme," declared W. Keyse with burning eyes.
"And the Doctor's goin' to find it does." He held up his lean right hand
and swore it. "So 'elp me, Jimmy Cripps!"

LVIII

Lynette Saxham came into the consulting-room that was on the ground-floor
of the house in Harley Street, behind the room where patients waited their
turn. Her quick, light step and the silken rustling of the lining of her
gown broke the spell that had bound the man who sat motionless in the
armchair before the Sheraton writing-table, staring with fixed eyes and
gripping the arms of his chair with unconscious force ...

A faint, pleasant odour of Russia leather and camphor-wood came from the
dwarf bookcases that dadoed the walls. The room was quite dark; the two
high windows, screened by clear muslin blinds running on gilded rods,
showed pale parallelograms of cold twilight. The coachhouse and stable
building at the end of the paved yard showed as a cube of blackness. One
window in the centre of the wall was lighted up, and on its white cotton
blind the shadows of a man and woman acted a Domestic Play.

Perhaps Saxham had been watching this? The shadow-man seemed to sit at a
table reading a newspaper by the light of the lamp behind him, the shadow
woman sat nearer the window, employed upon some homely kind of needlework.
Her outline when she rose, showed that the woman's great, mysterious
ordeal, the sacrament of keenest anguish by which her dearest and most
sacred joy is won, was very close upon her. She passed behind the man as
if to fetch something, stopped behind his chair, and dre