ce.

Thus Mahony sat in judgment, giving rein for once to his ingrained
dislike for the man of whom he had now made an enemy. In whose debt,
for the rest, he stood deep. And had done, ever since the day he had
been fool enough, like the fly in the nursery rhyme, to seek out Ocock
and his familiars in their grimy little "parlour" in Chancery Lane.

But his first heat spent he soon cooled down, and was able to laugh at
the stagy explosiveness of his attitude. So much for the personal side
of the matter. Looked at from a business angle it was more serious. The
fact of him having been shown the door by a patient of Ocock's standing
was bound, as Mary saw, to react unfavourably on the rest of the
practice. The news would run like wildfire through the place; never
were such hotbeds of gossip as these colonial towns. Besides, the
colleague who had been called in to Mrs. Agnes in his stead, was none
too well disposed towards him.

His fears were justified. It quickly got about that he had made a
blunder: all Mrs. Henry needed, said the new-comer, was change of air
and scene; and forthwith the lady was packed off on a trial trip to
Sydney. Mahony held his head high, and refused to notice looks and
hints. But he knew all about what went on behind his back: he was
morbidly sensitive to atmosphere; could tell how a house was charged as
soon as he crossed the threshold. People were saying: a mistake there,
why not here, too? Slow recoveries asked themselves if a fresh
treatment might not benefit them; lovers of blue pills hungered for
more drastic remedies. The disaffection would blow over, of course; but
it was painful while it lasted; and things were not bettered by one of
his patients choosing just this inconvenient moment to die--an elderly
man, down with the Russian influenza, who disobeyed orders, got up too
early and was carried off by double pneumonia inside a week.--Worry
over the mishap robbed his poor medical attendant of sleep for several
nights on end.

Not that this was surprising; he found it much harder than of old to
keep his mind from running on his patients outside working-hours. In
his younger days he had laid down fixed rules on this score. Every
brainworker, he held, must in his spare time be able to detach his
thoughts from his chief business, pin them to something of quite
another kind, no matter how trivial: keep fowls or root round gardens,
play the flute or go in for carpentry. Now, he might have dug t