ed him to
popularity; with tired, joyless heart he buried himself in his lonely
home after the treadmill hours were over. Only some exceptional case of
suffering or technical interest had power to rouse him. He was but happy
when ministering to the physical pain of others; if possible, he would
have shared it. In mental trouble the absolute prick and smart of bodily
injury seems a welcome inconvenience, for at least it admits of hope,
the continued hope of recovery, to give impetus to life. He was neither
mawkish nor sentimental--his years of scientific training had pruned
such tendencies; but the inborn sympathy with his fellow-men which had
prompted him to the choice of medicine as a career permeated every
tissue of his medical knowledge and supplemented a powerful element of
healing peculiarly its own. He had been ever ready to throw heart and
soul into any case of interest or alarm, but now his patients found him
more than ever devoted. They did not know that in their service alone
the heart's blood of the man was kept from anaesthesia. For nearly a
month Ralph Danby avoided the house in Mervan Street; then with the
inconsistency symbolic of great minds, he decided to go there at once.
He counselled himself that half a loaf was better than no bread, and
came rightly to the conclusion that if he intended calling again, the
more he postponed the ordeal the more impossible would be the resumption
of the old relations which had existed so happily before he had made a
fool of himself.

On the doorstep he trembled--absolutely trembled (he who, in Egypt, had
bandaged wound after wound, while bullets peppered the air with their
metal hail)--but once in her presence, her serene composure was
infectious, he was himself again, and almost forgot his last unhappy
visit and the miserable interregnum of mental nothingness from which he
had suffered. He might have been uneasy or constrained, but her calm
suavity left him no opportunity. About her manner there was no spark of
vanity, no simpering nor restraint--she was merely a well-bred young
hostess entertaining an intimate friend.

In novels heroines are credited with the exhibition of complex emotions
on the smallest provocation, but women of breeding in the nineteenth
century are too good actresses to hang their hearts on their sleeves
without exceptional cause. So Ralph Danby's little brougham came and
went as of yore, and only in the solitary evenings, when reason
unprejudi