true----

"Out of the mouths of babes"--he murmured to himself as he went down the
shallow oak stairs--"strange if, after all, the child should be the one
to clear up the whole mysterious affair! At any rate, we are a step
further on the way to elucidation; and from the bottom of my heart I
hope Mrs. Carstairs may be righted at last!"

And with this aspiration on his lips he entered the drawing-room and
related the substance of his unexpectedly profitable interview with the
unsuspicious Cherry to an interested and enthralled audience of two.

CHAPTER VI

It did not take Anstice long to discover that the accusation against
him--an accusation all the more difficult to refute because of the
half-truth on which it was based--had been disseminated throughout
Littlefield with a thoroughness which implied a determination on the
part of the anonymous writer to leave no prominent resident in the
neighbourhood in ignorance of Anstice's supposed cowardice on that
bygone day in India.

He could not help noticing as he went here and there on his daily
business that some of his patients looked askance at him, although they
did their best to hide their new and rather disconcerting interest in
him. So far as he knew, none of his patients forsook him for another and
less notorious doctor, but he was keenly alive to the altered manner of
some of those whom he attended, and although at present it was evident
that he was not yet condemned--after all, no fair-minded person condemns
another solely on the evidence of a tale-bearer who is ashamed to put
his name to the stories he relates--yet Anstice felt with a quick
galling of his pride that he was on probation, as it were, that those
with whom he came in contact were considering what verdict they should
pass upon him. And although his indifference to that verdict equalled
Mrs. Carstairs' former indifference to the opinion of these same
neighbours, his soul was seared with the thought that his unhappy
story--or rather a garbled version of it--was common property among
those men and women whom he had served faithfully to the best of his
ability during the eighteen months he had spent in Littlefield.

On one thing he was fully determined. So soon as this mystery should be
solved--and he fancied a solution was no longer impossible--he would
leave the place, resign the position which had become tedious,
unbearably tedious in its cramped monotony, and seek some other place,
in Eng