ould be uttered against her.

While Sir Bernard went out to visit her ladyship and two or three
other nervous women living in the same neighbourhood, I seated myself
in his chair and saw the afternoon callers one after another. I fear
that the advice I gave during those couple of hours was not very
notable for its shrewdness or brilliancy. As in other professions, so
in medicine, when one's brain is overflowing with private affairs, one
cannot attend properly to patients. On such occasions one is apt to
ask the usual questions mechanically, hear the replies and scribble a
prescription of some harmless formula. On the afternoon in question I
certainly believe myself guilty of such lapse of professional
attention. Yet even we doctors are human, although our patients
frequently forget that fact. The medico is a long-suffering person,
even in these days of scarcity of properly-qualified men--the first
person called on emergency, and the very last to be paid!

It was past five o'clock before I was able to return to my rooms, and
on arrival I found upon my table a note from Jevons. It was dated from
the Yorick Club, a small but exceedingly comfortable Bohemian centre
in Bedford Street, Covent Garden, and had evidently been written
hurriedly on the previous night:--

_"I hear you are absent in the country. That is unfortunate.
But as soon as you receive this, lose no time in calling at
the Hennikers' and making casual inquiries regarding Miss
Mivart. Something has happened, but what it is I have failed
to discover. You stand a better chance. Go at once. I must
leave for Bath to-night. Address me at the Royal Hotel, G.
W. Station._

"AMBLER JEVONS."

What could have transpired? And why had my friend's movements been so
exceedingly erratic of late, if he had not been following some clue?
Would that clue lead him to the truth, I wondered? Or was he still
suspicious of Ethelwynn's guilt?

Puzzled by this vague note, and wondering what had occurred, and
whether the trip to Bath was in connection with it, I made a hasty
toilet and drove in a hansom to the Hennikers'.

Mrs. Henniker met me in the drawing-room, just as gushing and charming
as ever. She was one of those many women in London who seek to hang on
to the skirts of polite society by reason of a distant connexion being
a countess--a fact of which she never failed to remind the stranger
before half-an-hour's acqu