ing Veiga this time yesterday. You wouldn't even have sent for old
Plott."

Mrs. Prohack merely kissed her husband again, with a kind of ineffable
resignation. Then Machin came in with her breakfast, and said that Dr.
Veiga would be round shortly, and was told to telephone to the Treasury
that her master was ill in bed.

"And what about my breakfast?" the victim enquired with irony. "Give me
some of your egg."

"No, dearest, egg is the very last thing you should have with that
colour."

"Well, if you'd like to know, I don't want any breakfast. Couldn't eat
any."

"There you are!" Mrs. Prohack exclaimed triumphantly. "And yet you swear
you aren't ill! That just shows.... It will be quite the best thing for
you not to take anything until Dr. Veiga's been."

Mr. Prohack, helpless, examined the ceiling, and decided to go to the
office in the afternoon. He tried to be unhappy but couldn't. Eye was
too funny, too delicious, too exquisitely and ingenuously "firm," too
blissful in having him at her mercy, for him to be unhappy.... To say
nothing of the hundred thousand pounds! And he knew that Eve also was
secretly revelling in the hundred thousand pounds. Dr. Veiga was her
first bite at it.

* * * * *

II

Considering that he was well on the way to being a fashionable
physician, Dr. Veiga arrived with surprising promptitude. Mr. Prohack
wondered what hold Eve had upon him and how she had acquired it. He was
prejudiced against the fellow before he came into the bedroom, simply
because Eve, on hearing the noise of a car and a doorbell, had hurried
downstairs, and a considerable interval had elapsed between the doctor's
entrance into the house and his appearance at the bedside. Mr. Prohack
guessed easily that those two had been plotting against him. Strange how
Eve could be passionately loyal and basely deceitful simultaneously! The
two-faced creature led the doctor forward with a candid smile that
partook equally of the smile of a guardian angel and the smile of a
cherub. She was an unparalleled comedian.

Dr. Veiga was fattish and rather shabby; about sixty years of age. He
spoke perfectly correct English with a marked foreign accent. His
demeanour was bland, slightly familiar, philosophical and sympathetic.
Dr. Plott's eyes would have said: "This is my thirteenth visit this
morning, and I've eighteen more to do, and it's all very tedious. Why
_do_ you people let yourselves get i