ance through the _Times_ and the _Daily Mail_,
there would start the procession that until evening would be passing
steadily through his consulting-room.

He sighed, and pulled in his horse to a walk. To-day he was reluctant to
encounter that procession.

And yet each day it brought interest into his life, this procession of
his patients.

Generally he was a keen man. He had no need to feign an ardour that he
really felt. He had a passion for investigation, and his profession
enabled him to gratify it. Very modern, as a rule, were those who came
to him, one by one, admitted each in turn by his Jewish man-servant;
complex, caught fast in the net of civilized life. He liked to sit alone
with them in his quiet chamber, to seek out the hidden links which
united the physical to the mental man in each, to watch the pull of soul
on body, of body on soul. But to-day he recoiled from work. Deep down in
his nature, hidden generally beneath his strong activity, there was
something that longed to sit in the sunshine and dream away the hours,
leaving all fates serenely, or perhaps indifferently, between the hands
of God.

"I will take a holiday some day," he said to himself, "a long holiday. I
will go far away from here, to the land where I am really at home, where
I am in my own place."

As he thought this, he looked up, and his eyes rested upon the brown
facade of the King's Palace, upon the gilded railings that separated it
from the public way, upon the sentries who were on guard, fresh-faced,
alert, staring upon London with their calmly British eyes.

"In my own place," he repeated to himself.

And now his lips and his eyes were smiling. And he saw the great drama
of London as something that a schoolboy could understand at a glance.

Was it really idleness he longed for? He did not know why, but abruptly
his desire had changed. And he found himself wishing for events, tragic,
tremendous, horrible even--anything, if they were unusual, were such as
to set the man who was involved in them apart from his fellows. The
foreign element in him woke up, called, perhaps, from repose by the
unusually languid air, and London seemed meaningless to him, a city
where a man of his type could neither dream, nor act, with all the
languor, or all the energy, that was within him. And he imagined, as
sometimes clever children do, a distant country where all romances
unwind their shining coils, where he would find the incentive which he
nee