o boast of." He added, as he got up to take his leave: "The thing
has been carefully cleaned. The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked
in one place, but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd
hand it over to--anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled many
professional appointments. Remember me to Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully!
So long!"

LXV

In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a man with whom
he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp during the strenuous days of
the Siege--a man who would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those
days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written
by an unsteady hand.

Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper basket with a
contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental note of the address, and
drove there that afternoon.

The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the grimy stucco
Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's in Wendish Street, West.
Saxham rang a loud bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged
passages, and brought a little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the
door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home and
able to receive a visitor?

The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, and wore one
eyebrow several inches higher than the other, shook her rusty
crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she informed Saxham in a husky
voice strongly flavoured with cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the
Confessional all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the
Ascension, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she could do, she
inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, she
would be happy to oblige the gentleman.

"I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. Fraithorn. You see
that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with unsmiling gravity, "and not an
ordinary caller on business connected with religion."

The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snorted as
scenting godlessness, and conducted Saxham down a cream-washed,
brown-distemper-dadoed passage, smelling of kippered haddocks and incense,
to a sitting-room at the rear. It was a severe apartment, commanding a
view of mews, and had a parquet-patterned linoleum on the floor, and a
washable paper of a popular ecclesiastical design suggestive of a
ranunculus with its hands in its pockets.

Stained deal bookcases contained Juli