will my wife say?"

He walked up and down the library, with Stella's disappointment and
Lady Loring's indignation prophetically present in his mind. There was,
however, no help for it--he must accept his responsibility, and be the
bearer of the bad news.

He was on the point of leaving the library, when a visitor appeared.
The visitor was no less a person than Romayne himself. "Have I arrived
before my letter?" he asked eagerly.

Lord Loring showed him the letter.

"Throw it into the fire," he said, "and let me try to excuse myself for
having written it. You remember the happier days when you used to call
me the creature of impulse? An impulse produced that letter. Another
impulse brings me here to disown it. I can only explain my strange
conduct by asking you to help me at the outset. Will you carry your
memory back to the day of the medical consultation on my case? I want
you to correct me, if I inadvertently misrepresent my advisers. Two of
them were physicians. The third, and last, was a surgeon, a personal
friend of yours; and _he_, as well as I recollect, told you how the
consultation ended?"

"Quite right, Romayne--so far."

"The first of the two physicians," Romayne proceeded, "declared my case
to be entirely attributable to nervous derangement, and to be curable by
purely medical means. I speak ignorantly; but, in plain English, that, I
believe, was the substance of what he said?"

"The substance of what he said," Lord Loring replied, "and the substance
of his prescriptions--which, I think, you afterward tore up?"

"If you have no faith in a prescription," said Romayne, "that is, in my
opinion, the best use to which you can put it. When it came to the turn
of the second physician, he differed with the first, as absolutely
as one man can differ with another. The third medical authority, your
friend the surgeon, took a middle course, and brought the consultation
to an end by combining the first physician's view and the second
physician's view, and mingling the two opposite forms of treatment in
one harmonious result?"

Lord Loring remarked that this was not a very respectful way of
describing the conclusion of the medical proceedings. That it was the
conclusion, however, he could not honestly deny.

"As long as I am right," said Romayne, "nothing else appears to be
of much importance. As I told you at the time, the second physician
appeared to me to be the only one of the three authorities who really