gh and a sob. Immediately
after she had uttered it she cleared her throat.

"I told Doctor Isaacson his coming here to-day was absolutely useless,"
began Doctor Hartley. "I told him no consultation was required. I begged
him to leave the case in my hands. Over and over again I--"

"Oh, you don't know Doctor Isaacson if you think that a courteous
request will have any effect upon him. If he wants to be in a thing, he
will be in it, and nothing in heaven or earth will stop him. You forget
his nationality."

She yawned again, and moved her shoulders.

"You are wronging me grossly, and you know it!" Isaacson said, in a very
low voice.

He had laid his hat down on a little straw table. Now he took it up.
What was the good of staying? How could a decent man stay? And yet the
struggle within him was bitter. If he could only have been certain of
this man Hartley, perhaps there would have been no struggle. He might
have gone with an almost quiet heart. Or if he had been certain of
something else, absolutely certain, he might have remained and acted,
completely careless in his defiance of the woman who hated him. But
though his instinct was alive, telling him things, whispering,
whispering all the time; even though his observation had on the previous
night begun to back up his instinct, saying, "Yes, you must be right!
You are right!" yet he actually knew nothing. He knew nothing except
that this young man, between whose hands lay Nigel's life, was under the
spell of Mrs. Armine.

He took up his hat and held it tightly, crushing the soft brim between
his fingers. Doctor Hartley was looking at him with the undisguised
enmity of the egoist tricked. He had had time to find out that Isaacson
had begun subtly to induce him to do what he had refused to do. If Mrs.
Armine had not appeared unexpectedly, Nigel Armine's case would have
been, perhaps, pretty thoroughly discussed by the two doctors.

"Pushing trickster!"

His round eyes said that with all the vindictiveness of injured conceit.

"You are wronging me!" repeated Isaacson--"wronging me shamefully!"

Was he going? Yes, he supposed so. Yet he did not go.

"It's not a question of wronging any one," she said. "Facts are facts."

Her face was ravaged with physical misery. There was a battle going on
between the sleeping draught she had taken and her will to be sleepless.
She moved her shoulders again, with a sort of shudder, sideways.

"Nigel doesn't want you," she sai