e before two o'clock to-day will do," said the doctor.

She looked at him with a languid curiosity--nothing more. "Why before
two?" she inquired.

"Because this is one of my 'Visitors' Days,' And the visitors' time is
from two to four."

"What have I to do with your visitors?"

"Simply this. I think it important that perfectly respectable and
perfectly disinterested witnesses should see you, in my house, in the
character of a lady who has come to consult me."

"Your motive seems rather far-fetched. Is it the only motive you have in
the matter?"

"My dear, dear lady!" remonstrated the doctor, "have I any concealments
from _you_? Surely, you ought to know me better than that?"

"Yes," she said, with a weary contempt. "It's dull enough of me not to
understand you by this time. Send word upstairs when I am wanted." She
left him, and went back to her room.

Two o'clock came; and in a quarter of an hour afterward the visitors
had arrived. Short as the notice had been, cheerless as the Sanitarium
looked to spectators from without, the doctor's invitation had been
largely accepted, nevertheless, by the female members of the families
whom he had addressed. In the miserable monotony of the lives led by a
large section of the middle classes of England, anything is welcome
to the women which offers them any sort of harmless refuge from the
established tyranny of the principle that all human happiness begins and
ends at home. While the imperious needs of a commercial country limited
the representatives of the male sex, among the doctor's visitors, to one
feeble old man and one sleepy little boy, the women, poor souls, to the
number of no less than sixteen--old and young, married and single--had
seized the golden opportunity of a plunge into public life. Harmoniously
united by the two common objects which they all had in view--in the
first place, to look at each other, and, in the second place, to look at
the Sanitarium--they streamed in neatly dressed procession through the
doctor's dreary iron gates, with a thin varnish over them of assumed
superiority to all unladylike excitement, most significant and most
pitiable to see!

The proprietor of the Sanitarium received his visitors in the hall with
Miss Gwilt on his arm. The hungry eyes of every woman in the company
overlooked the doctor as if no such person had existed; and, fixing on
the strange lady, devoured her from head to foot in an instant.

"My First Inmate," sa