d the Gang--and Frances Wilmot?" he asked. He looked shyly at his
companion's profile, which showed up for a moment in a bold, tranquil
outline against the lamplight. It betrayed nothing.

"We might walk back to my rooms and talk in peace. Oh--Francey Wilmot?
I don't know much. She went abroad--finished her course very late--she
was always a bit of a dilettante. People with money usually are."

Cosgrave said no more. He knew all he wanted to know. It saddened him.
Somehow he had counted on that half-divined romance, had played with it
in his fancy as with a kind of vicarious happiness.

3

On board the S.S. _Launceston_ there had arrived, an hour before sailing,
an American gentleman--a certain Mr. Horace Fletcher, who, having been
called home suddenly, had had to take what accommodation he could get on
the first available boat. Two days later he had lain unconscious,
strapped to the captain's table, whilst the ship's doctor, a young man,
himself in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical
operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The
whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained
stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness,
comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of
seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted
at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat
performance--under the circumstances a masterpiece.

It was the nearest possible approach to a medical advertisement. Mr.
Fletcher was a member of a well-known New York family, and the papers had
given the story, with fantastic details as to the ship's doctor's career,
a first-page prominence. Mr. Fletcher himself had proved to be both
generous and grateful. In assessing the value of his own life at 1,000
pounds, he had argued with good humour and good sense, he had erred on
the side of modesty, and Robert Stonehouse, having weighed the argument
gravely, had accepted its practical conclusion as just and reasonable.
He had taken rooms, thereupon, if not actually in Harley Street, at least
under the ramparts, fitted them out with the most modern surgical
appliances that his capital allowed, and had sat down to wait.
Fortunately he had learnt the art of starving before. He slept in a
garret, and the bottom drawer of the handsome mahogany desk in his
consulting-room knew the grim secret