r hospital treatment to the insane, in order
to secure a kind of official sanction for his institution, he took the
wise precaution to proclaim from the housetops that he would enlist the
services of ex-medical officers of the hospitals. The idea was a shrewd
and a successful one, and his establishment throve.

Perret and Sembadel were having breakfast, and also were grumbling.

"I shouldn't curse the meanness of the management quite so much if they
didn't put us on to all the jobs," said Sembadel. "Hang it all, man, we
are both qualified, and when we undertook to assist Dr. Biron we did so,
I presume, in order to top off our theoretical training with some
practical clinical experience."

"Who's stopping you?" Perret enquired.

"How can we find the time, when besides all our actual work with the
patients, we have to do all this administrative work, writing to people
to say how the patients are, and all that? That ought to be done by
clerks, not by us."

"Isn't one job as good as another?" Perret retorted. "Besides, we are
the only people who know how the patients really are, so it's common
sense that we should have to write to their friends."

"They might let us have a secretary, anyhow," Sembadel growled.

Perret saw that his friend was in a bad temper, so did not try to carry
on the argument.

"Say," he said, "you ought to make a special note of that case of No.
25, for your thesis. She was in your ward for about six months, wasn't
she?"

"No. 25?" said Sembadel. "Yes, I know: a woman named Rambert; age about
forty; hallucination that people are persecuting her; anaemic, with
alternate crises of excitement and melancholia, punctuated by fits of
passion; treatment: rest, nourishment, anodynes."

"You evidently remember the case distinctly."

"She interested me; she has marvellous eyes. Well, what about her?"

"Why, when she was moved into my pavilion the diagnosis was bad and the
prognosis very bad: she was supposed to be incurable. Just go and see
her now: her brain is restored: she's a new woman." He came to the table
and picked up some notepaper. "I wrote to her husband a day or two ago
and told him he might expect to hear that his wife had recovered, but I
imagine my letter miscarried, for I've had no answer. I have a good mind
to write to him again and ask for permission to send her to the
convalescent home. The mischief of it is that this Etienne Rambert may
want to remove her altogether, and that w