ould mean one paying patient
less, which would put our worthy director in a bad temper for a month."

He turned to his correspondence, and for some minutes the silence in the
room was only broken by the scratching of pens on paper. Then an
attendant came in, bringing a quantity of letters. Perret picked them up
and began to sort them out.

"None for you," he said to Sembadel. "Not one of those little mauve
envelopes which you look for every day and which decide what your temper
will be. I must look out for storms."

"Shan't even have time to grouse to-day," Sembadel growled again. "You
forget that Swelding pays us an official visit to-day."

"The Danish professor? Is it this morning that he is coming?"

"So it seems."

"Who is the fellow?"

"Just one of those foreign savants who haven't succeeded in becoming
famous at home and so go abroad to worry other people under a pretext of
investigations. That's why he wants to come here. Wrote some beastly
little pamphlet on the ideontology of the hyper-imaginative. Never heard
of it myself."

The conversation dropped, and presently the two men went off to their
wards to see their patients, and warn the attendants to have everything
in apple-pie order for the official inspection.

* * * * *

Meantime, in the great drawing-room, elaborate courtesies were being
exchanged between Dr. Biron and Professor Swelding.

Dr. Biron was a man of about forty, with a high-coloured face and an
active, vigorous frame. He gesticulated freely and spoke in an unctuous,
fawning tone.

"I am delighted at the great compliment you pay me by coming here, sir,"
he said. "When I started this institution five years ago I certainly did
not dare to hope that it would so soon win sufficient reputation to
entitle it to the honour of inspection by men so eminent in the
scientific world as yourself."

The professor listened with a courteous smile but evinced no hurry in
replying.

Professor Swelding was certainly a remarkable figure. He might have been
sixty, but he bore very lightly the weight of the years that laid their
snows upon his thick and curly but startlingly white hair. It was this
hair that attracted attention first; it was of extraordinary thickness
and was joined on to a heavy moustache and a long and massive beard. He
was like a man who might have taken a vow never to cut his hair. It
covered his ears and grew low upon his forehead, so that hardly