d as she looked back at him. At last he spoke.

"My child," he said, "if I were a poor and hungry doctor it is not to be
doubted that I should give you something in a bottle and tell you to
come to me again. But I am a wealthy physician and I can afford to tell
you truth. I can do nothing for you. You must cure yourself, or fail to
do it so completely that I shall be needed to enable you to fail again.
When you have repeated this last process sufficiently, I shall no longer
be thus enabled and you will die. That is all."

"Die?" said she; "I shall die?"

"You will die," he said, "with everything that the world calls good
fortune in your lap. With no excuse for doing so, but with every reason
to be glad that you are doing so. Leaving behind you someone who needed
you and more whom you needed. Now go home and think, and before you go,
drink this."

Silently he poured out for her a tiny glassful of some colourless,
aromatic liquid and in silence she drank it and left the room, where the
dying sun glinted upon the gilded books. It seemed to her that he
touched a bell on the desk with his hand, and though the cordial had
already begun to affect her head strangely, she was able to observe that
it was in answer to this bell that his office nurse appeared at the door
as she reached it and put a steadying arm behind her.

"Come this way," said the nurse, "and sit a moment; do you feel a little
dizzy?"

"A little," she answered, and her voice seemed to come from far away; "I
am afraid that drink was stronger than it should have been ... if I
could sit down ... the doctor...."

She knew that the nurse was helping her to a couch in a tiny room she
had never been in before; she knew that she sank upon it and that the
nurse settled her upon a bright crimson cushion; she heard her soothing
murmur and nodded to show that she was not alarmed, only vexed at her
own weakness, and then she ceased to struggle with the overwhelming
drowsiness that oppressed her, and slept.

When she woke it was dark in the room. In the street the electric lights
glowed, and the people passed steadily by the window; was it midnight,
she wondered, or only early dusk? How strange that the doctor and the
nurse had forgotten her!

"But, of course he would not have wished me waked," she said, and rose,
straightened her dress, waited a moment, and then pulled impatiently at
an old-fashioned bell-rope that hung by the door. There was no answer.
Again she