admitted
Tait. "But this is about the last straw."

The housemaid dissolved in tears.

"He'll get another young lady," said the cook confidently. "And him so
'andsome an' so clever, an' with such heaps of carriage-swells for
patients."

Tait shook his prim, respectable head.

"The swells'll show their tongues to another man now, my gal, who 'asn't
the dirt of the Old Bailey on his coat-sleeve. Whistle for patients now,
that's what the doctor may. Why, every one of 'em has paid their bills,
and them that haven't have asked for their accounts to be sent in. And
it's 'Lady So-and-so presents her compliments,' instead of 'Dear Dr.
Saxham.' Done for, he is, at least as far as the West End's concerned....
Mind, I don't set up to be infallible, but experience justifies a certain
amount of cocksureness, and what I say is--Done for! Best he can do
is--sell the practice, and lease, and plate, and pictures, furniture, and
so on, for whatever he can get--the movables would have provoked spirited
biddin' at auction if the verdict had been Guilty, but, under the
circumstances, they won't bring a twentieth part of their valoo--and go
Abroad." Tait's gesture was large and vague.

"Foreign parts. Pore dear, it do seem cruel!" sighed the cook.

"And 'is young lady false to 'im, and all. I wonder he don't do away with
hisself," sobbed the housemaid. "I do, reely!"

"With all them wicked knives and deadly bottles handy," added the cook.

"Not him!" said Tait. "I'm ready to lay any man the sporting odd against
him committing sooicide. He's not the sort. Lord! what was that?"

That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs.

XVII

While the servants talked in the kitchen the master had been sitting
quietly in the darkening study. All without and within the man was
eddying, swirling blackness. Heat beat and glowed upon his forehead, like
the radiation from molten metal; there was a winnowing and fanning as of
giant wings or leaping of furnace-fires. The blood in his throbbing
temples sang a dull, tuneless song. But presently he became aware of
another kind of singing.

It was a little hissing voice that came from the inside of the
oak-and-silver cellaret. And it sang a song that the man who sat near had
never heard before.

"Why think of the sharp lancet or the keen razor, why long for the swift
dismissing pang of the fragrant acid, or the leap down upon the
railway-track under the crushing, pulping iron wheels?" sa