It was now past dusk and the
street-lamps were lighted; and looking in at the basement windows of
this house, Joe saw that no curtains were drawn, that the gas was
burning within, over a table and under a shade; and that at the table
sat a man with head bent down and fingers busy at some kind of
mechanical contrivance.

"That will do," she muttered to herself. "The Doctor _is_ in, as I
believed he might be at this hour, and I shall have no occasion to
disturb the people up-stairs."

Passing under the steps she reached the closed door, and instead of
ringing, banged half a dozen times against the panels with her hand,
very slowly and tragically, as the ghost in "Don Giovanni" might ask to
be admitted, provided it had any occasion for using the door.
Immediately there was a shuffle inside, and directly the door opened and
a tall figure stood in the doorway. There was enough light from the
street-lamp to make the young girl's face and figure pretty plainly
visible, and the moment he saw her the occupant said:

"I thought so--mischief! I thought I knew that knock! No one else ever
takes such liberties with my office-door. What do you want now? But come
in, before you forget it!" and seizing both her hands with a playful
gesture, he dragged her within the door, closed it, pulled her through
the side-door into the front basement which formed the office, drew up a
clumsy cushioned operating-chair near the table, sat her down in it,
then cast himself into a chair immediately in front of her, threw one
leg over the other and his hands behind his head, and said:

"Now I am resigned and prepared. Out with it!"

Had Josephine Harris not been familiar with the place and its occupant,
as it was quite evident that she _was_, she would have looked twice at
the one and several times at the other. That little basement-room was
not only the office in which Doctor LaTurque received professional
calls, but it was also the sanctum in which were prepared most of the
oddly-trenchant articles in the _Scimetar_, a quarterly medical and
critical publication with a habit cutting as its name and a reputation
dangerous enough to suit the most sensational fancy. Few persons
connected with the practice of medicine in or about the great city, who
had not first or last suffered some incision from the trenchant blade of
the _Scimetar_, wielded by the wiry arm of the Doctor; and few humbugs
but he had pricked and exposed, by the same means or in per