without
delay."

"Yes, sir." The butler closed his fingers upon the card and the
half-sovereign which accompanied it. "Better hang your coat up here in
the hall. It is very wet. Now if you will wait here in the
consulting-room, I have no doubt that I shall be able to send the
doctor in to you."

It was a large and lofty room in which the young baronet found himself.
The carpet was so soft and thick that his feet made no sound as he
walked across it. The two gas jets were turned only half-way up, and
the dim light with the faint aromatic smell which filled the air had a
vaguely religious suggestion. He sat down in a shining leather
armchair by the smouldering fire and looked gloomily about him. Two
sides of the room were taken up with books, fat and sombre, with broad
gold lettering upon their backs. Beside him was the high,
old-fashioned mantelpiece of white marble--the top of it strewed with
cotton wadding and bandages, graduated measures, and little bottles.
There was one with a broad neck just above him containing bluestone,
and another narrower one with what looked like the ruins of a broken
pipestem and "Caustic" outside upon a red label. Thermometers,
hypodermic syringes bistouries and spatulas were scattered about both
on the mantelpiece and on the central table on either side of the
sloping desk. On the same table, to the right, stood copies of the
five books which Dr. Horace Selby had written upon the subject with
which his name is peculiarly associated, while on the left, on the top
of a red medical directory, lay a huge glass model of a human eye the
size of a turnip, which opened down the centre to expose the lens and
double chamber within.

Sir Francis Norton had never been remarkable for his powers of
observation, and yet he found himself watching these trifles with the
keenest attention. Even the corrosion of the cork of an acid bottle
caught his eye, and he wondered that the doctor did not use glass
stoppers. Tiny scratches where the light glinted off from the table,
little stains upon the leather of the desk, chemical formulae scribbled
upon the labels of the phials--nothing was too slight to arrest his
attention. And his sense of hearing was equally alert. The heavy
ticking of the solemn black clock above the mantelpiece struck quite
painfully upon his ears. Yet in spite of it, and in spite also of the
thick, old-fashioned wooden partition, he could hear voices of men
talking in th