s on end.

But though he thus succeeded in setting bounds to his activity, he
still had a great deal too much to do; and, in tired moments, or when
tic plagued him, thought the sole way out of the impasse would be to
associate some one with him as partner or assistant. And once he was
within an ace of doing so, chance throwing what he considered a likely
person across his path. In attending a coroner's inquest, he made the
acquaintance of a member of the profession who was on his way from the
Ovens district--a coach journey of well over two hundred miles--to a
place called Walwala, a day's ride to the west of Ballarat. And since
this was a pleasant-spoken man and intelligent--though with a somewhat
down-at-heel look--besides being a stranger to the town, Mahony
impulsively took him home to dinner. In the evening they sat and
talked. The visitor, whose name was Wakefield, was considerably
Mahony's senior. By his own account he had had but a rough time of it
for the past couple of years. A good practice which he had worked up in
the seaport of Warrnambool had come to an untimely end. He did not
enter into the reasons for this. "I was unfortunate ... had a piece of
ill-luck," was how he referred to it. And knowing how fatally easy was
a trip in diagnosis, a slip of the scalpel, Mahony tactfully helped him
over the allusion. From Warrnambool Wakefield had gone to the extreme
north of the colony; but the eighteen months spent there had nearly
been his undoing. Money had not come in badly; but his wife and family
had suffered from the great heat, and the scattered nature of the work
had worn him to skin and bone. He was now casting about him for a more
suitable place. He could not afford to buy a practice, must just creep
in where he found a vacancy. And Walwala, where he understood there had
never been a resident practitioner, seemed to offer an opening.

Mahony felt genuinely sorry for the man; and after he had gone sat and
revolved the idea, in the event of Walwala proving unsuitable, of
taking Wakefield on as his assistant. He went to bed full of the scheme
and broached it to Mary before they slept. Mary made big eyes to
herself as she listened. Like a wise wife, however, she did not press
her own views that night, while the idea bubbled hot in him; for, at
such times, when some new project seemed to promise the millennium, he
stood opposition badly. But she lay awake telling off the reasons she
would put before him in t