self.

"Have a drop?"

"Well, it's not often I do, but I will to-night. Steady on with the
whisky, old chap."

Each took a charged glass and sipped. Edwin, by raising his arm, could
just lodge his glass on the mantelpiece. Charlie then opened his large
gun-metal cigarette case, and one match lighted two cigarettes.

"Yes, my boy," Charlie resumed, as he meditatively blew out the match
and threw it on the fire, "you may well say `delicate.' The truth is
that if I hadn't seen at once that Stirling was a very decent sort of
chap, and very friendly here, I might have funked it. Yes, I might. He
came in just after we'd arrived. So I saw him alone--here. I made a
clean breast of it, and put myself in his hands. Of course he
appreciated the situation at once; and considering he'd never seen her,
it was rather clever of him... I suppose people rather like that Scotch
accent of his, down here?"

"They say he makes over a thousand a year already," Edwin replied. He
was thinking. "Is she likely to be coming downstairs? No."

"The deuce he does!" Charlie murmured, with ingenuous animation,
foolishly betraying by an instant's lack of self-control the fact that
Ealing was not Utopia. Envy was in his voice as he continued: "It's
astonishing how some chaps can come along and walk straight into
anything they want--whatever it happens to be!"

"What do you think of him as a doctor?" Edwin questioned.

"Seems all right," said Charlie, with a fine brief effort to be
patronising.

"He's got a great reputation down here," Edwin said quietly.

"Yes, yes. I should say he's quite all right."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

"How came it that Mrs Cannon came and rummaged you out?" Edwin knew
that he would blush, and so he reached up for his whisky, and drank,
adding: "The old man still clings to his old brand of Scotch."

"My dear fellow, I know no more than you. I was perfectly staggered--I
can tell you that. I hadn't seen her since before she was married.
Only heard of her again just lately through Janet. I suppose it was
Janet who told her I was at Ealing. It's an absolute fact that just at
the first blush I didn't even recognise her."

"Didn't you?" Edwin wondered how this could be.

"I did not. She came into our surgery, as if she'd come out of the next
room and I'd seen her only yesterday, and she just asked me to come away
with her at once to Burs