n'. Mrs. Saxham's bedroom and dressin'-room they belongs to.
I've bin inside the bedroom wiv the upper 'ouse-an'-parlour-myde, an' a
Fairy Princess in a Drury Lane Pantomime might 'ave a bigger place to
sleep in--but not a beautifuller. When the Foreign Young Person come in of
evenin's to git 'er lady dressed for dinner, she snaps up the lights,
bein' a kind soul, before she draws the blinds, to give me a charnst like,
to see in." She stroked the tweed sleeve. "An' once or twice Mrs. Saxham
'as come in before they'd bin pull down, an' then--O William!--there was
everythink in that room on Gawd's good earth a 'usband could ask for to
make 'im 'appy, except the wife's 'art beatin' warm and lovin' in the
middle of it all!"

"Cripps!... You don't never mean ...?" He gasped. "Wot? Don't the Doctor
make no odds to 'er? A Man Like That?" ...

She clung to the heart that loved her, and told him what she had heard....
And if Saxham had known how two of the unconscious actors in his
shadow-play pitied him, the knowledge would have been as vitriol poured
into an open wound.

LXIII

The card of Major Bingham Wrynche, C.B., was brought to Saxham one
morning, as, his early-calling patients seen and dismissed, the Doctor was
going out to his waiting motor-brougham.

Bingo, following what he was prone to call his pasteboard, presented
himself--a large, cool, well-bred, if rather stupid-looking, man, arrayed
in excellently-fitting clothes, saying:

"You were goin' out? Don't let me keep you. Look in again!"--even as he
deposited a tightly-rolled silk umbrella in the waste-paper basket, and
tenderly balanced his gleaming hat upon the edge of the writing-table, and
chose, by the ordeal of punch, a comfortable chair, as a man prepared to
remain. Saxham, pushing a cigar-box across the consulting-room table,
asked after Lady Hannah.

"First-rate! Seems to agree with her, having a one-armed husband to fuss
over!"

"She won't have a one-armed husband long," returned Saxham, not unkindly,
glancing at the bandaged and strapped-up limb that had been shattered by
an expanding bullet, and was neatly suspended in its cut sleeve in the
shiny black sling.

"By the Living Tinker! she's had him long enough for me!" exploded Bingo,
who seemed larger and fussier than ever, if a thought less pink. "So'd you
say if they tucked a napkin under your chin at meals, and cut your meat up
into dice for you, and you'd ever tried to fold up