r o'clock, when Sir Bernard
drove to Victoria Station, my time in the evening was very much my
own.

Many a man would, I suppose, have envied me. It is not every day that
a first-class physician requires an assistant, and certainly no man
could have been more generous and kindly disposed than Sir Bernard
himself, even though his character was something of the miser. Yet all
of us find some petty shortcomings in the good things of this world,
and I was no exception. Sometimes I grumbled, but generally, be it
said, without much cause.

Truth to tell, a mysterious feeling of insecurity had been gradually
creeping upon me through several months; indeed ever since I had
returned from a holiday in Scotland in the spring. I could not define
it, not really knowing what had excited the curious apprehensions
within me. Nevertheless, I had that night told my secret to Ambler
Jevons, who was often my visitor of an evening, and over our whiskies
had asked his advice, with the unsatisfactory result which I have
already written down.

CHAPTER II.

"A VERY UGLY SECRET."

The consulting-room in Harley Street, where Sir Bernard Eyton saw his
patients and gathered in his guineas for his ill-scribbled
prescriptions, differed little from a hundred others in the same
severe and depressing thoroughfare.

It was a very sombre apartment. The walls were painted dark green and
hung with two or three old portraits in oils; the furniture was of a
style long past, heavy and covered in brown morocco, and the big
writing-table, behind which the great doctor would sit blinking at his
patient through the circular gold-rimmed glasses, that gave him a
somewhat Teutonic appearance, was noted for its prim neatness and
orderly array. On the one side was an adjustable couch; on the other a
bookcase with glass doors containing a number of instruments which
were, however, not visible because of curtains of green silk behind
the glass.

Into that room, on three days a week, Ford, the severely respectable
footman, ushered in patients one after the other, many of them Society
women suffering from what is known in these degenerate days as
"nerves." Indeed, Eyton was _par excellence_ a ladies' doctor, for so
many of the gentler sex get burnt up in the mad rush of a London
season.

I had made up my mind to consult my chief, and with that object
entered his room on the following afternoon at a quarter before four.

"Well, Boyd, anything fresh?" h