nscience-stricken, "only it was so heavenly! I had the bad luck to
oversleep this morning; it would be dreadful to repeat the offence."

"Why should you care?"

"How like a man! Don't you grasp the fact that my living depends on
what doctors think of me?"

"In that case, you'll never be out of work."

She laughed.

"No, seriously, I was in the doctor's bad graces this morning. Not
only was I late, but I dropped a basin of water on the floor. Wasn't
it stupid? He looked at me as if he thought I was weak-minded."

"Pooh! I shouldn't let that worry me."

"I don't, only ... do you know, that man has a curious effect on me,
something sort of paralysing.... I can't explain it, quite."

"Does he? How do you mean?"

She told him, on an impulse, about her dream and her subsequent
recognition of the python as a symbol of the doctor's personality.

"It sounds silly, but it was really quite horrible," she ended with a
little laugh. "To feel I was in the creature's power, and that it
didn't _care_, it had no feeling--I was simply something to be crushed,
annihilated."

"He _is_ a cold-blooded sort of person," said Roger thoughtfully. "Not
that it matters much, if, as my aunt says, he is so good at his job.
Only, of course, it is pretty apt to prevent his becoming exactly
popular."

"That wouldn't worry him. He only wants to be able to live in order to
carry on research."

When the car turned in at the drive Roger fancied he saw a thread of
light from one of the drawing-room windows. The next instant it was
gone, and he decided he had been mistaken; it must have been a trick of
the moonlight. The house loomed dark before them. He garaged the car,
and escorting Esther upstairs, parted from her at the end of the short
passage leading to her room.

"Thanks for a gorgeous time," she whispered, careful not to make a
noise.

He thought how lovely she was as she looked up at him, her lashes
curving back from her lambent eyes, the soft curls of her hair ruffling
back from her warm forehead.

"If you've really liked it," he said, detaining her hand a little
longer than was necessary, "you'll come with me again?"

She smiled and was gone, the brief adieu leaving each of them to wonder
how much more was meant than the polite commonplaces uttered.

Roger leaned out of his own window for ten minutes smoking, his mind
full of a pleasant excitement. Disturbing, too, for with the
unaccustomed feeling that perha