the inviolate sanctity of this English
Colonial home, hiccoughed as he stumbled up the stately flight of three
cement steps that led between white-painted railings, enclosing on the
left hand a narrow strip of garden with some dusty mimosa shrubs growing
in it, to the green door that bore the brass plate, and had the red lamp
fitted in the hall-light above it. The plate bore this comprehensive
inscription:

G. DE BOURSY-WILLIAMS, M.D., F.R.C.S. Lond.

CONSULTING-ROOM HOURS: 10 A.M. TO 12 A.M.; 6 P.M. TO 8 P.M.

MODERN DENTISTRY IN ALL ITS BRANCHES.

And, scanning the inscription for perhaps the thousandth time, the grim,
tender mouth under the ragged black moustache took a satirical twist at
the corners, for nobody knew better than Owen Saxham, called of men in
Gueldersdorp the "Dop Doctor," what a brazen lie it proclaimed. He heard
the town-clock on the stad square strike five as he pulled out the
latchkey from his pocket and let himself in, shouting:

"Koets!"

A glazed door at the end of the passage, advertised in letters of black
paint upon the ground-glass as "Dispensary," opened, and a long, thin
Dutchman, dressed in respectable black, looked out. He had been hoping
that the drunken Englishman had been shot or stabbed in a saloon-brawl, or
had fallen down in apoplexy in a liquor-bout, and had been brought home
dead on a shutter at last. His long ginger-coloured face showed his cruel
disappointment. But he said, as though the question had been asked:

"No, there is no telegram from Cape Town."

Then he shut the glazed door, and returned to the very congenial
occupation in which he had been engaged, and Owen Saxham went heavily to
the bedroom placed at the disposal of the _locum tenens_. The single
window looked out upon a square garden with a tennis-ground, where the De
Boursy-Williams girls had been used to play. The apricot on the south wall
was laden with the as yet immature fruit, an abandoned household cat
slept, unconscious of impending starvation, upon a bench under a
pepper-tree.

It was a small, sordid, shabby chamber, with a fly-spotted paper, a chest
of drawers lacking knobs, a greenish swing looking-glass, and a narrow
iron bedstead. His scanty belongings were scattered about. There were no
medical books or surgical instruments. The Dop Doctor had sold all the
tools of his trade years before. He turned to Williams's books, standard
works which had been bought at his recommendation, when