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HARLEY STREET

A Novel

by

H. de VERE STACPOOLE

PART ONE

Dr. O’Flynn’s practice stretched from his surgery in little Endell Street round and about as far as Gordon Square on the north and half down Drury Lane on the south. It was a mixed practice, and though the surgery was frankly a converted shop, and though his work took him to slums like those in Sardinia Street, he had a few good patients such, for instance, as the Burkes of Gordon Square and Miss Julia Corkran of Cunningham Mansions, all Irish and Catholics, like himself.

O’Flynn was of the stock that supplies such good recruits to the priesthood and the medical profession; thirty and over, good-looking, with a twinkle in his eye, a humorous tongue, and a careless manner, he was friends with all men and women, with the police of the Bow Street district and the criminals hunted by the police, with the publicans and the sinners on whom the publicans lived, with anarchists and old apple women.

Careless in dress and manner, he sometimes contravened the strict dictates governing the rules of medical procedure; acting generally on the impulse of his heart he sometimes even transgressed the laws of ordinary life, doing things that no English professional man would ever dream of doing—like, for instance, the thing I am going to tell you about presently.

Biddy, fifty-eight, from Kerry, cook, housemaid, and general factotum, made up with Billy, the surgery-boy, the whole of the doctor’s ménage. Billy would arrive every morning at eight, departing at five. Biddy rarely went out, except to Mass; she had no holding with the ‘ould trash’ of English people round about; aching always to be back in Tralee, she led the life of a prisoner in the Bastille, bound by the chains of household duties and barred from escape by her absolute, unflinching, almost incredible devotion to the doctor.

For the sake of O’Flynn she even permitted children to play on the house door-step. You must understand, and this is an important part of the geography of my story, that the shop door was the way of ingress for patients, the house door with its night bell and speaking-tube was sacred to the doctor and private callers; children, however, never being driven away from it, haunted it, urged by the passion for door-steps that seems part of a child’s mind make-up. Imitation tea-parties were given on it, perambulators anchored off it, and hop-scotch pitches chalked on the pavement in front of it, just as tennis courts are laid out in more fashionable resorts; and just as the rotation of games visits the pleasure places of the well-to-do, so, here, the top season, the marble season, and the chestnut season followed one another with a regularity unalterable by war or the death of kings or the shifting policies of the Parliament of Westminster.

One day, returning to his door-step and his midday meal, the doctor found a message awaiting him. Biddy delivered it verbally as she uncovered his chop.

“Miss Corkran sent round after you were gone askin’ you to call immediate, and I tould the chap that brought the message you wasn’t an aeroplane,” said Biddy, dish-cover inverted in her hand, “and to tell her you was out on your rounds and wouldn’t be back till past noon.”

“Bother Miss Corkran,” said O’Flynn. But ‘bother’ wasn’t the word he used.

It was always the way with rich patients; urgent messages to come at once, sent at impossible times, and he had experienced trouble and enough with the Corkran woman ever since her dog had died a month ago.

It was in the man’s rough-and-ready nature to use the word ‘damn’ in connection with her and it was in his nature to understand and appreciate her, this attenuated woman of thirty-five, all spirit and affection yet lonely, somehow, as Robinson Crusoe; without chick or child, ever ready to help the poor, yet, somehow, without the power of making friends amongst the rich. Instinctive as a dog and, for that reason perhaps, trusting in and loving O’Flynn.

A love that had no more to do with sex than Battersea Park has to do with the Albert Memorial.

A delightful friend—for whom he would have walked bare-footed down Drury Lane, but the devil of a patient. She had just that fault, just that bit of selfishness in her nature that made her forget a doctor wasn’t an aeroplane, had only legs, in fact, and dozens and dozens of other patients to see.

He didn’t hurry himself over the meal and when he started on his afternoon rounds he left Miss Corkran almost the last on his list, arriving at Cunningham Mansions about four.

It lies close to Gower Street, this great hive of flats, the first of their sort in London, inhabited by the special brand of London people who live in flat-land, a re-creation quite distinct from the race of London people who still inhabit houses.

The entrance to Cunningham Mansions is bleak as the entrance to Pentonville Prison; there is no porter. If the lift is down the boy who runs it will take you up, if it is not down you ring for the boy and wait.

As his patient lived on the first floor, O’Flynn did not bother to wait, he went up the stone stairs, knocked at the door, and was admitted by Margaret.

Margaret was County Dublin pure and simple, a stout, matronly woman with chestnut coloured hair worn flat on the forehead and a Dublin accent, which is to the accent of Kerry as Cockney to West Somerset.

“Is Miss Julia in?” asked the doctor.

“In,” said Margaret, “faith where else would she be, she hasn’t set foot to the ground since here you were last, achin’ and pinin’ on the sofa and me near driven distracted with her.”

She took his hat, and leading him down the passage ushered him into a sitting-room filled with twilight and the pleasant flickering light of a fire, the perfume of violets and the fragrance of China tea.

Every room has a soul born of the spirit of its inhabitants or inhabitant, and this room with its books in dainty bindings, its gadgets to insure comfort, its priceless porcelain, and its three water-colours from the brush of Daubigny, was a fairly faithful reflection of the dainty, dreamy, super-sensitive, and super-civilized soul of its owner.

By the couch stood a table with tea things for one and near the table a chair with a cushion on which had once reposed the dog.

Miss Corkran, on the entrance of the physician, laid down the Celtic Twilight that she had been reading.

It is a thing to be read by twilight or firelight and this super-refined sensualist had evidently been trying to do both. She held out a ringless attenuated hand to the other, but she did not offer tea.

The Corkrans of Castle Corkran were a very old Irish family and the O’Flynns were just the O’Flynns, perhaps that was the reason she did not offer tea even to this tired friend, or perhaps it was because, being bound up in herself, she didn’t think.

He took his seat beside her with a few words and picked up a book that had fallen from the couch to the floor. He noted the title as he placed it on the table by the tea things, Have Animals Souls—Yes!

“And now let’s look at your tongue,” said he.

On that order given to the commonality a mouth flies open like a trap door and a tongue protrudes itself even to the roots.

But the Corkrans are different: moving and moistening her lips, wiping them with a lace edged handkerchief, she presented a tongue on a salver, so to speak, a tongue fresh and innocent as the tongue of a child.

“Hm,” said O’Flynn.

He took her pulse, a pulse soft as a six-year-old’s, even, and full of vitality if not of robustness.

“Bad,” said O’Flynn, “you haven’t been doing as I told you. Oh, there’s no use in talking of neuralgia when you won’t listen to my advice. Here you’ve been lying ever since I saw you last.”

“Oh, no, I haven’t,” cut in the patient. “I’ve been up and about—”

“Up and about. It’s up and out I told you to be. It’s not your body, it’s your mind that you want to take out for a walk, I told you that last time and I won’t tell you again, there now, you have it plain.”

Miss Corkran sighed.

“Here you are,” he went on, “just with your books and yourself—sure that’s no way to be living with a great big world outside and all its people wanting you.”

“I can’t bear people,” sighed Miss Corkran. “I know it’s wicked and all that, but I’ve tried it—ever since—no matter——”

She pleated her handkerchief, and to O’Flynn there came the suggestion, and not for the first time, that Julia Corkran in the years before he had been her doctor and friend had experienced a cross in her affections.

“Maybe you’ve never tried the right people,” said he. “I come to you for money for the poor souls down in Sardinia Street or Drury Lane and out leaps your purse; never a friend of the poor better than you. Well, get into a cab and come down and see them, the salt of the earth they are and the welcome of God they’ll give you.”

But Miss Corkran shook her head, she could do anything for the poor but touch them, poverty, squalor, and dirt horrified her, she hinted as much and then she slipped back to her ailments imploring of him a sleeping draught for that night.

O’Flynn wrote the prescription:—

“Send it down to Roberts of Bond Street,” said he. “There’s not another chemist in London I’d trust to make it up.”

Outside he talked a moment to Margaret on the landing.

“Oh, don’t be asking me how she is,” said he. “Haven’t you eyes in your head as well as myself. It’s dying she is for the want of that dog. Where’s your senses not to have got her another.”

“Dog,” cried Margaret. “I tould her that, and it’s seven fits she went into at me words. ‘Never another, never another,’ cried she; lost she is over that wheezin’ plate-faced brute of a pekinese.”

“Well, it’s a dog or an undertaker for her,” said O’Flynn, and off he went.

He took his way back to the surgery on foot. A patient like Julia Corkran stands out strangely in a practice like O’Flynn’s. He had seen that day twenty-one patients besides those who came to the surgery, working people, small shopkeepers struggling to make two ends meet, women to shudder over and men sure to be gaoled again within the month, and the chief one of the lot craving pity was Julia Corkran.

“She’s never known trouble and that’s what’s the matter with her,” said O’Flynn to himself as he went his way.

And she was worth perhaps two thousand a year; this woman without a family had what would have brought joy and well-being to fifty of such families as formed the staple of his practice.

He thought of this and then forgot the whole matter as he turned into Wise Street to see the last patient on his list, an old woman living down a foggy court and dying of cancer.

The fog, that grey Bloomsbury evening mist that seems to rise from the past, was dimming the lamps of Endell Street when he reached it. Carter’s, the grocers and oil shop next door to the surgery, was casting its glow right out on the side walk and on his door-step, half revealed by the light of the nearest lamp and the reflected glow of Carter’s, was a bundle propped against the door.

He bent down. It was a baby. A baby wrapped and wrapped in a dirty old shawl with other things underneath, no doubt, to make it warm and comfortable, for it was asleep, the match he struck revealed that, also that its face was dirty.

Beside this living bundle was a small tin of salmon tucked close up to it, almost hidden by the shawl.

O’Flynn flung the match away and looked up and down the street. Not a soul, nothing but the bell of a muffin man unseen in the mist and the far rumour of traffic from the streets beyond.

It wasn’t his first experience of the sort. Only a few months ago a three-months-old child had been left in his surgery, in a basket, like a turkey. A London doctor, if he is known to be a man of good heart amongst the lower orders, is liable to this sort of surprise. It had been sent promptly to the Parish and the fact advertised as a deterrent to similar contributors, yet here was another—and bigger than the last.

He bent down and picked the bundle up, kicked the tin of salmon on to the pavement and opened the door with his latch-key.

Upstairs in the sitting-room with the bundle on Biddy’s lap before the fire, unwrapping produced not only a fat infant just rousing from sleep and winding itself up to cry, but a feeding bottle with a long un-hygienic rubber tube and teat.

Biddy popped the teat in its mouth and after a second’s indecision it chose the better part and sucked.

The doctor standing with his back to the fire watched it as it sat, its black beady eyes taking in the points of this new environment as it fed. It was a boy.

The other had been a girl. The other had been very well dressed, had worn a veil and little woollen gloves, and with his terrible knowledge of London and local life he could have put his fingers on the district it came from and on the sort of woman who had deserted it. This was quite a different proposition.

This was a slum baby.

Now people in the slums don’t desert their babies. They do all sorts of other things, but they don’t do that, and O’Flynn must have been blind, absolutely blind for the moment to have been led astray as he was. Blind, or, anyhow, half blinded by the great new idea that had suddenly seized him.

Here was a creature that God had put in his hands, a human life in the bud, a fine strong boy that might live to be a university man or a captain of armies, or might live to be an outcast brought up by the Parish and ending, maybe, as a labourer or gaol bird.

It all depended on his decision.

“Biddy,” said he, “fetch me down that old tin bath in the attic and bring up a can of hot water and a towel, I’ll hold the child, after that you can fetch me the little old soft blanket, you’ll find in the chest in me bedroom. Don’t be asking questions, and while you’re giving him his bath I’ll nip down to the surgery and polish off the patients.”

Two hours later a taxi drove up to Cunningham Mansions and O’Flynn, a bundle under his arm, knocked at the door of the Corkran flat.

Margaret opened to him.

“Here’s your dog,” said he, “left at me door by the Holy Virgin herself. Not a word out of you. Take it in to her and tell her you found it on the door-mat. I’ve given it three drops of soothin’ stuff and it’ll sleep till the morning and the Lord have mercy on your souls if you don’t treat it like a Christian.”

There is nothing like decision when you are dealing with women. Had O’Flynn been a weak man or a man not of the order to which he belonged he might have been arguing with Margaret still and this story would never have been written; as it was, he left her bludgeoned with the baby in her arms and an order to let him know “how she takes to it.”

But the strongest minded man cannot destroy the small worry that bores like a termite and that comes very often in the form of an afterthought.

He had got into bed that night with the satisfied feeling that comes of a day’s work well done and he was congratulating himself on the last stroke.

It was one of those things that really come to a man’s hand. The woman wanted that which all women want consciously or sub-consciously, a child. Just as a hen will take to a porcelain egg she had taken to a dog: this was the real thing if she would only, so to speak, sit on it. His knowledge of women and life told him that most probably she would. On the other hand the child wanted to be saved from the cold world where it had been left on a cold door-step.

O’Flynn had all superficial sentimentality rubbed off him long ago, but his good warm heart going out to the creature had measured the distance, the distance he had carried it that night, the distance from poverty and neglect to wealth and the saving power of love.

Oh, it was a curious and grand business entirely. He ran it all over in his mind as he lay there in the dark before closing his eyes—and then, and not till then, came the small worry that had been waiting to trip him.

Funny thing that tin of salmon. What did the unfortunate creature who had left the baby mean by leaving a tin of salmon with it?

Holy Mike. It couldn’t be that she’d left them both to be come back for! Nonsense, where was the sense in a thing like that?

Carters, the shop next door, sold salmon. The poor round about had three grand passions in the way of food, salmon, sardines, and fried fish and chips—could she have been to Carter’s, bought the salmon and then left the baby and it whilst she went off for something else? Nonsense, there was no other shop near by and, even if there was, no woman in her senses would do a thing like that.

Well, there was no use in bothering over an insoluble problem and like a sensible man he turned the worry down and went to sleep.

O’Flynn never read the papers or only the “Freeman’s Journal” sent him every week by an aunt in Dublin, so he did not see a paragraph in next morning’s Daily Mail relative to a baby lost by Mrs. McGinnis of Sardinia Street, W. Said baby having been taken out by Noreen, an elder sister, from whom it had been snatched by a tall man with a long black beard. Noreen, according to the Daily Mail reporter, being a child of ten years and her manner and tale confused and contradictory.

O’Flynn saw nothing of all this and heard nothing of it, for his rapid cash practice brought no gossipers to his consulting-room, the only report that reached him was a scrawl from Margaret received next evening. Four words in pencil on a half sheet of note paper, She’s took to it. He left it at that, well satisfied to leave it at that, and days passed and a week slipped by and a week on top of that till one Friday Biddy burst in on him.

“That baby,” said Biddy, “it’s Mrs. Ginnis’s down in Sardinia Street.”

“What baby?” asked O’Flynn who was in his shirt sleeves unpacking some drugs.

“What baby—why, the child you took off to Miss Corkran’s. I heard be chance, not two minits ago, from Mrs. Strahane when I went to get the pitatoes, and, says she, wid her big goggle eyes weighin’ them out, ‘that poor Mrs. Ginnis,’ says she, ‘never a word or whisper she’s heard yet of her baby.’ ‘What baby?’ says I ‘Why, the baby she lost,’ says she, ‘that was snatched from young Noreen by a big man with a black beard, bad cess to him, it and a tin of salmon the creature had bought and was fetchin’ home to her mother—sure where have you been that you haven’t heard tell of it?’

“ ‘Mindin’ my own business,’ says I, ‘and two more pitatoes in the pan please to turn the scale.’ She and her goggle eyes talking to distract me with her short weights—and back I come hot foot to tell you.”

O’Flynn scratched his head.

Somehow or another he was scarcely surprised, a subconscious buffer had been building itself up to take the shock. “Sardinia Street,” said he, reviewing that Irish quarter more Irish even than Conway Street or Tamplin Place. “Well, I’ll be down that way this afternoon and I’ll have a look, maybe she’s right and maybe she’s wrong, but don’t breathe a word to anyone till I see what’s doing.”

There was a Mary Ginnis in his case book and, sure enough, an hour or so later when he turned into Sardinia Street, a place disgraceful to civilization, humanity and the century we live in, he found it was the mother of the lost one, a big woman pounding clothes in a wash-tub and surrounded by her tribe, happy to all appearances, vigorous, scolding, but breaking into a freshet of tears at the mention of the tragedy—whose other name was Pat.

He gave her half-a-crown as a contribution to her sorrow and then, singling out and attracting to himself Noreen, took her by the hand to the little corner shop to buy her some sweets.

Noreen, black-haired and violet eyed and in old burst boots that belonged to an elder sister, had lied steadfastly if not consistently to all and sundry over this business, but she did not lie to O’Flynn. He had the way with him where women and children were concerned and he had the whole story in two minutes under promise of secrecy.

She had been that fateful evening to Carter’s to buy a tin of salmon, carrying Pat. She had planned to visit Naylor’s front window in the street beyond to have a glimpse at the Coronation tree which was being exhibited in honour of His Majesty’s coronation, a tree which she had seen once already and which she proposed to see every evening, if possible, just as people go again and again to see a play. But Carter had kept her waiting a terrible long time, so long that only by running as hard as she could pelt could she do the business in hand and get back without the chance of a skelping.

But she couldn’t run with Pat. So she stuck him in the doorway where she had played so often and which seemed quite safe, him and the salmon, and she hadn’t been more than a minute looking into the window before she ran back to find Pat gone.

O’Flynn asked for no more, not even the genesis of the suppositious big man with the black beard. He knew. She had not dared to confess her crime. Pat had been ‘took from her’ and invention had come to her aid. The big man with the black beard took all the scolding and skelping.

He left her happy with two ounces of liquorice balls and a scarcely relieved mind, for she had come almost to believe in her own story. Then he turned north towards Cunningham Mansions.

Pat had got to be returned.

There were no two ways about that. You can’t knowingly rob a mother of a child, even though the mother is a Mrs. Ginnis and her habitat Sardinia Street.

Julia Corkran would have to come down to a dog, or advertise for an infant, or get married and have one in the natural way, she wasn’t too old, Sarah had one when she was seventy, anyhow he wasn’t going to be bothered any more in the business, he had trouble enough in his practice presenting people with children in the ordinary way without this sort of thing.

He arrived at Cunningham Mansions in a distinctly gruff mood. Margaret let him in. She was all smiles.

She showed him in without a word—a wonderful fact where she was concerned—showed him into the sitting-room where Julia Corkran ‘her legs off the sofa,’ to use his expression, was seated in an arm-chair by the fire stitching.

The fact that she looked better was nothing, what checked him was the fact that she looked younger, more material, more ‘full of blood.’

He listened to her wonderful story of the poor mite that had been left at the door, scarce heeding, he knew the story so well; scarce listening, occupied almost entirely with the change in her, a change of which she herself seemed absolutely unconscious.

Then he followed her into her bedroom where there was a fire and where by her bedside stood a glorified cot in which his majesty Pat, filled with the finest of milk, was sleeping the sleep of the just.

A new hygienic feeding bottle was on the dainty dressing table, things were warming by the fire.

He took it all in and then, as he watched her bending over the cot, he took in the tremendous fact that he had made this woman a mother.

He had come to tell her the child belonged to another woman and had to be given back. He left without doing so. He could not bring himself to the words or the act. He told himself that he would just as soon take a pistol and shoot her and then he told himself that, all the same, it had to be done.

This mental discussion took place as he came along New Oxford Street in the direction of where he lived.

His mind, made agile by the stimulus of the business, sought hither and thither for an avenue out of this perplexity. Maybe Mrs. Ginnis would consent to part—or at all events stand off and adopt an attitude of benevolent neutrality for the child’s sake.

The contrast of the Corkran flat and the Ginnis ménage appeared before him deluding him for a moment to believe that no woman in her sane mind would rob the child of its present and prospective advantages.

For a moment only. He knew the poor and he knew his people. He knew that if Pat were to be discovered in Buckingham Palace, in the monkey-house of the Zoo or the children’s ward of the workhouse infirmary it would be all the same to Mrs. Ginnis. She did not want a future that she could not visualize for the child, she wanted Pat.

There was nothing wrong about Sardinia Street to Mrs. Ginnis who had lived there all her married life—nothing but the absence of Pat.

No. There was only one way out, restitution, and, arrived home, he called Biddy down, closed the door of the sitting-room, and opened his mind.

Biddy had to do the business, it was a woman’s business, anyhow. She could see Margaret and have a talk with her, and between them they could break it to the poor creature.

Biddy did not like the thing a bit, but she assented. Never said a word to show her feelings. She was that sort.

“I’ll go, when I’ve done me cookin’,” said Biddy, and she went.

She was back just before O’Flynn had returned from his afternoon round, back and sitting in the kitchen with a shawl over her head.

“I couldn’t find it in me heart to do it,” wailed Biddy before he spoke a word. “I couldn’t find it in me heart to do it. It’s the life and all, he is to her and she wid her beautiful face like the Blessed Virgin hangin’ over him. Sure, what’s Mrs. McGinnis, lettin’ him run wild about the shtreet wid that girul, hasn’t she enough children not to be botherin’ about the cratur? You tould me yourself, the place was like a warren wid them. Children or not, she can stick. Hand nor foot will I lift for her to fetch him back.”

“Then,” said the doctor, “I’ll just have to fetch him myself.”

“Not you,” said Biddy, suddenly divesting herself of the shawl and furiously addressing herself to the peeling of some potatoes waiting in a bowl.

She was right in a way. As things were standing O’Flynn would never have had the heart to do the business. But things were not going to stand like that.

It was next day at noon that he received a note from Margaret, the gist of which ran:—

O’Flynn whistled. In their simple-mindedness neither he, Margaret, nor Julia had ever thought of this. He knew what it was that Miss Hancock wouldn’t believe and he had seen the lady once. High-nosed, aristocratic, old time, rather flighty in manner, and with that slight crack in her that seems to run through all Ireland and its people, making them so charming, yet not making, somehow, for clarity of vision and temperate views in the cracked ones.

If she wouldn’t believe Julia and Margaret, she certainly wouldn’t believe him.

He said this to himself as he got into his overcoat and put on his hat. Then, feeling like a man who holds the ace and queen and knows the king is out, he got into a cab and drove to Sardinia Street.

The child had to be got back and Mrs. Ginnis brought to Cunningham Mansions to do the business and to down-face Miss Hancock.

Mrs. Ginnis lived close to the Spanish Ambassador’s house, which would have been a fashionable address a hundred and fifty years ago, or at any time before he shifted his address to where he lives now.

The house of the Ambassador has vanished with the street, which was pulled down when they widened Drury Lane, and it seems a pity for it housed twenty or thirty families, in state if not in comfort, and its broad steps, up which you could have driven a coach and four, formed a paradise for children.

‘The Children’s Paradise.’ What a poetical title for a poem or story! Yet I could make you one without any poesy to hand—just a few old tin cans and leave to beat them; a rubbish heap and leave to delve; steps to sit on and pretend at being ladies nursing dolls.

There were few dolls in Sardinia Street, but lots of babies, so they had to make do; carriages created by the fairy wand of childhood, not from pumpkins but old soap boxes, set down and took up at the ambassadorial residence where glass coaches, now less than shadows, did the business for brocaded ladies and gentlemen in perukes, and such a vehicle, with a soap-box body was, in fact, taking up to-day just as Dr. O’Flynn’s four-wheeled cab was setting him down at Mrs. Ginnis’ little vegetable shop over against the Embassy.

Mrs. Ginnis sold vegetables when she wasn’t washing, back-chatting with Mrs. Murphy, cooking, wet nursing the last baby, and attending to her husband, who was a porter in Covent Garden market. O’Flynn had his speech ready prepared to be delivered on sight of the lady. It was short. Only eleven words.

“On with your bonnet, and come with me, I’ve found Pat.”

But the lady wasn’t there; the little shop was empty of everything but a few cabbages, bundles of carrots, potatoes in an open sack by the door, and some wizened looking oranges.

There was a cash register which wouldn’t work, bought by Mr. Ginnis one day when he had drink taken, out of swank at an open shop auction in Rupert Street and brought home on a barrow.

It wouldn’t work, but its bell rang, so it had its uses as well as its ornament value.

“If I’m not in the shop give the ould rigister a bang,” was a direction understood by intimate customers of whom, however, the doctor was not one, so he banged with his heel on the floor to attract attention.

There were people in the parlour at the back of the shop; he could hear sounds of conversation and laughter but no sign of response, so coming to the parlour door he gave a rap on the panel and opened it.

The room was blue with tobacco smoke from Mr. Ginnis’ pipe, there was a black bottle on the table, glasses on the board and in the hands of several guests sitting round, also a smell of gin and an atmosphere of festivity. Mr. Ginnis, in fact, had won in some sort of gamble, and though he had only put on a shilling the odds were fifty to one. So he was well in pocket, as well as spirits.

The entrance of the doctor disturbed nothing. He was known to all present, and in the present state of their lit-up minds it probably seemed that the good news had brought him in.

An old chair was offered him which he took, refreshment which he refused without offence, being known to be that way, and so he sat for a moment as one of the company absorbing the atmosphere and the scene, including the picture of Mrs. G., flushed and careless for the moment of worries and bothers, shop and customers, taxes and children.

Alas for the happiness of the poor, so often to be summed-up in one word, ‘forgetfulness,’ and what makes for forgetfulness better than a bit of luck and a drop of drink combined?

Well O’Flynn knew this.

Mr. Haggerty of the fried fish shop near by came to buy a cabbage and, finding nothing to attend to his wants but the cash register, pushed open the parlour door and looked in. He had a round red face, and was invited to enter, Mrs. G. trying to rise to receive him and alas, failing.

O’Flynn sat taking it all in.

“Put on your bonnet and come with me—”

The words did not seem to apply now to the lady whose cheery forgetfulness had made her forget even such little things as buttoning properly the top buttons of her bodice. The urge to utter them had departed.

The question whether she could have stood steady on her feet if she had got up was never to be settled, but all indications seemed in the negative.

“Well I must be going,” said he, rising up and giving a pull of the ear and a penny to the youngest of the Ginnis brood—there were three of them in the room—“I’ve got to get on with my work,” and off he went, leaving behind him the warm impression that he had just dropped in to congratulate, having heard of the luck.

Outside he got into the waiting four-wheeler, ordering the driver to take him to Cunningham Mansions and make the old horse go.

There were three women in the four-wheeler with him unknown to the driver, Julia Corkran, Miss Hancock, and Mrs. Ginnis. The fact that the whole business was his own fault did not make him less furious with the lot of them.

Also in the cab was the perfume of the party he had just left. The combined perfumes of people, gin, the must of the shop, and a trace of kerosene.

The fact that Mrs. Ginnis was, for the moment, a burst gun for an attack on Miss Hancock was clear, but I think it was that breath of kerosene (for Mrs. Ginnis might have been mended) linked with the smells of people, must, gin, and old cabbages that determined the matter. Pat must never go back to that lot—but first Miss Hancock had to be met, fought, and dealt with.

The Hancocks of Castle Hancock, adjoining the village of Castle Brady, Co. Clare, were a very old Irish family; but, unlike many another old Irish family, time had not impoverished them, on the contrary, time in the form of the year 1881 had brought them considerable wealth owing to the death of Simeon Jurgenson, the brewer of Milwaukee, who had married one of the family and left his wealth to our Miss Hancock’s father who died in 1888 leaving all his possessions to this his only daughter. There were no sons, or only one, a bad egg, who had gone to Australia and never returned and who has nothing to do with this story.

Miss Hancock was about thirty-five, thin, but not at all bad looking; with a high colour, a high nose, a not unkindly nature but ‘proud as Punch’ by all accounts and addicted to out of date things. She could have had all the jewels she wanted but she ‘stuck to old bits of rubbish,’ cornelian hoop rings and lockets with grandmother’s hair in them, incredibly long chains and brooches such as were fashionable in Merrion Square in the fifties; but her old lace was not rubbish and, taken altogether, she had a style with her and, comparatively young though she was, a suggestion of other and more stately days.

Just as the Somervilles had made a close burrow of Castle Townsend, where nothing but a Somerville, a Bush or a Coghill dared show its nose so had the Hancocks done with Castle Brady on behalf of the Hancocks, the Corkrans, the Chattertons, and the Barringtons, all pretty much the same tribe but mostly dead now or gone to England, (dead in Ireland is pretty much the same thing).

But Jane Augusta Hancock carried on, a tribe in herself, dispensing high, and sometimes pretty low justice, amongst the tenantry who mostly owed her rents, the small shopkeepers of Castle Brady and the left-over gentry whom she allowed to shoot woodcock in the woods. It was said that no man had ever had the better of her or the last word with her. ‘Faith she’d have the last word with you if it was her dying breath.’

She always put up at the Hans Crescent Hotel on her frequent visits to London and on this visit, having one day nothing better to do she got into a hansom and drove to Cunningham Mansions to see how Julia was getting on.

She had not heard from her for a long time, had not heard of the death of the dog, knew nothing in fact and yet, when Margaret let her in, she knew, with the awful instinct which some women possess, that something had happened.

Julia was out for the moment, gone into Welbeck Street to buy some necessity from the chemist there, but Margaret’s manner was enough and the way she pleated her apron.

“Miss Julia is out, m’am.”

“When will she be in?”

“Well, I’m not so sure to be telling you. She told me she was going into Welbeck Street to the chemist’s, so it’s may be she won’t be long and it’s may be again she may.”

“Well, I’ll come in and wait,” said the visitor and was led into the room where we have seen the invalid on her couch with afternoon tea beside her and O’Flynn adjuring her to get on her legs and out into the busy world.

Well, she had got out into the busy world to-day, at least into the Welbeck Street end of it and there was nothing on the couch to tell of invalidism, little to tell of the literary dilettante, except the Celtic Twilight on an occasional table.

Miss Hancock picked up the book to glance at and said, “Tscha,” then, “And how’s the dog?”

The dog had always been an object of offence in her eyes, labelled privately in her mind (and rightly) as a fat, wheezy beast. How a girl like Julia had devoted herself to, let alone owned, such an animal was beyond her, quite; towing it about on the end of a string, feeding it on chicken, worshipping it.

“The dog’s gone, m’am.” (Margaret never called her Miss.)

“Gone?”

“It’s dead, ma’m.”

“Well, thank goodness for that.”

“It nearly broke her heart,” went on the other, now seeing and reaching for her objective. “She wasn’t to hold or to bind with the grief of it, and the doctor had a very bad opinion of her and Lord knows what mightn’t have happened only the child came.”

“What child?”

Margaret, having let the cat out of the bag at last, became flustered. Clear exposition was never her forte.

“I oughtn’t to have been telling you till she told you herself,” said she, “and maybe you’d better wait till she comes back and she’ll tell you herself; it’s a waif and stray.”

“You said it had come, where is it?”

“It’s in her bedroom.”

Miss Hancock rose from the chair she had taken.

“I’d like to see it,” said she.

“Sure it’s aslape.”

“No matter, I won’t wake it, come, let me see it.”

The bedroom made a pretty picture with its dainty appointments and by the bed the bassinette, a bassinette worthy of royalty, for instant on the acceptance of the new arrival Margaret had been dispatched in a cab to Whiteley’s for everything needful and she had not spared her mistress’ money.

Yes, the room made a pretty picture and with a young mother brooding over the infant would have found a worthy counterpart to that year’s Academy slop-stuff liner ‘His Majesty the Baby.’

“Waif and stray,” said the visitor bending to inspect the thing, “Why it’s an infant, it couldn’t have strayed here unless it strayed on its stomach.”

“Stomach, indeed!” cried the other, the suggestion seeming to raise her indignation, though why I don’t know. “I’m not used to my words being twisted on me—but here she is herself.”

The sound of the lift coming up had stopped, a voice cried, “Margaret!” and next moment through the half open door of the bedroom entered the proprietress of Pat, flushed and bright from exercise and the fresh air of Welbeck Street and carrying some small parcels.

It was less the presence of Miss Hancock than the presence in the bedroom that put Julia out.

If only the former had remained in the sitting-room nothing much might have occurred in the way of tension; however, Julia was Irish, like her aunt, and despite her semi-invalidhood and poetical nature had a temper (Irish) of the sort that flies out in curious ways ‘and not to be accounted for.’

It was not so much Miss Hancock as the invasion of the bedroom that brought it out now fully alive and directed, not against the invader, but Margaret.

“Margaret!” said she, ignoring her aunt, not wilfully but through the sudden blindness of anger, “What is the meaning of this?”

“Sure, I couldn’t help it,” replied Margaret, “she wanted to see it and would come in.” Thus upsetting the frying-pan properly and casting the fat of suspicion into the fire.

Not that Jane Hancock showed anything of this, she took her seat quietly in the arm-chair by the window with the air of a person who says, ‘well, as I’m here I may as well remain,’ and arranging one of her gloves, said, “Yes, when Margaret told me about the child I asked to see it, it’s not her fault, so don’t blame her.”

On which Margaret went out, closed the door on them and stood to listen.

She couldn’t hear much even with her ear to the panel; the mumbling and jumbling of voices went on for a long time till at last came the Hancock voice raised a bit sharply, “That’s all very well but think of the family, what will people say, it’s not what I think on the matter, it’s just what will others think.”

That was enough for the listener, she rushed for a bit of paper, scribbled the note we have seen on it and sent Billy the lift-boy with it to Little Endell Street with half-a-crown to pay the cab fare there and back. It reached O’Flynn just before noon and sent him on the Ginnis expedition to Sardinia Street, to fetch Mrs. Ginnis to down-face Miss Hancock.

The fact that having failed to bring with him that support he would have to down-face Miss Hancock himself was fully borne in on him as, exactly at twenty minutes past one, he got out of the cab at Cunningham Mansions and made for the lift.

Margaret let him into the flat. She had been waiting for him with ear on the lift and whisked him at once into a small room by the door of entrance that was half library, half writing room. There were three chairs and he took one of them as Margaret having closed the door and with her finger on her lip gave him news of the happenings.

“They’re better now,” said she, “they’ve settled down to it, but there’s still blazes underneath. Let her in, how could I help lettin’ her in and she one of the family. I served luncheon, only a chop it was, ten minutes early and they’re digestin’ it now, since it didn’t choke them—you’d better see her now you’re come. I’ll go and fetch her and tell her you’re here and, whatever you do, howld your temper.”

She went out and he waited.

There was only one formula that applied to every facet of this case, at least one expression, ‘Damn the women!’

Yet the thing was all his own making. A fact, however, that did not decrease the anger swelling and rising in his mind.

Ten confinement cases couldn’t have shattered his day more, would have worried him less; and he wasn’t the man to stand worry beyond a certain point without sharing it, especially when it is of the brand with spines on its back making for exasperation.

Now Jane Hancock, never a very self controlling person, was just now in a condition of mind not unlike his, only worse.

She had been condemned to a luncheon of a half-raw chop and fried potatoes, fried to cinders in the agony of Margaret’s mind. (Mrs. Raymond, the lady from Gower Street, who came in to do the small cooking required, had not come to-day.) Also, some jam tarts left over from yesterday and a piece of cheese of doubtful aspect that appeared, apologised for itself and vanished.

Nothing to drink, except a glass of fair cold water, for Julia was the miserable sort of teetotaler who takes no thought of the fact that others may have mouths. Riding all this was the exasperation of Julia and the fool she had made of herself in taking in the waif, and worse than that the exasperation of the Doctor and the blundering idiot he had made of himself bringing the thing to her and not taking it to the Foundling Hospital.

She had come to see the real position of things, but that did not help to soothe her, quite the reverse; if Pat had been a home-manufactured article the real scandal of him would be less a disaster, to be met with horror, no doubt, but with silence, if not sympathy, and help. That he was an imported article, innocent yet capable of radiating who knows what of scandal was an idea wildly infuriating. And yet she had held herself in facing a scene and the disruption of communications. So she listened to everything, how Dr. O’Flynn had found the poor atom on his door-step and the rest of it till interrupting the twice-told tale, Pat set up a bellowing from the bedroom that made the teller forget her story and rush to him.

It was at this moment that Margaret appeared to say that the Doctor had arrived, and was waiting in the little room if she’d like to see him.

The Doctor was looking at a picture on the wall when the door opened and Miss Hancock came in.

She came in rapidly and with her head high. “Margaret tells me that you are the Doctor,” said she, closing the door behind her without turning from him, “I suppose you have come about this unfortunate business?”

“You mean the child,” said he. “Yes, I’ve come about it and enough worry I’ve had about it, running here and there all day. Are you by any chance——”

“I’m Miss Corkran’s aunt” (as if he didn’t know it), “and she has told me all the circumstances, and I think it’s deplorable, yes deplorable that this should have happened. You found this child on your door-step——”

“I did.”

“Well, in the name of common sense, man, why didn’t you take it to the Foundling Hospital or the police station or somewhere instead of bringing it here? Why? You know her condition, if you are a doctor and not a fool, all nerves and sensibilities and fancies and yet you must go and——”

“Now, just you listen to me,” said the other, who was beginning rather to like the woman with her direct tongue and method of attack—leaving aside the truth that she had a lot of reason on her side. “Just you listen to me; she was going to pieces over the loss of that dog, her nerves were breaking up and then the sudden chance came——”

“Sudden grandmother!—If you wanted to give her something to fool over why in heaven’s name didn’t you get her another dog?”

“I declare to God,” said he, “I never thought of that—and if I had I couldn’t have done it, with the sudden chance in my hand of bettering them both. Here was a fine healthy child, I made sure of that, left out in the cold world, and she wanting one.”

“Oh, good heavens!” cried the other.

“And why shouldn’t she? What else is it a woman wants when they’re flying after dogs and cats—and look at her, you wouldn’t know her since she’s had it.”

Miss Hancock gathered herself together.

“Has it never occurred to you the scandal a thing like this may bring about?” said she. “Here’s a young girl——”

“She’s not so young as all that,” said he.

“Well, an unmarried woman if it pleases you better, with suddenly a young baby like this thrust on her and she tending it like a mother—I declare the sight of that bassinette when I saw it by her bedside made me feel suddenly sick; can’t you see, can’t you imagine people talking. Well, whether you can or you can’t, you’ve got her into this by your stupidity and you’ve just got to get her out of it.”

“That’s easy said—won’t you sit down? I’ve been on my feet since morning and I’m near out of my mind over this business. Well now, let’s be reasonable; there’s no call for people to know; a child is easy hid, it’s not as if it was an elephant, but leaving that aside what is it you propose for me to do?”

“Have you advertised for the mother?”

“I have not—and what’s more, I won’t, sending it back, maybe, to some gin-drinking creature in the slums. It’s maybe I was wrong, it’s maybe I was right, but now it’s done I’m not going to put my hand to the undoing of it—not that way anyhow. I’d sooner cut its throat and slaughter it.”

“Yes, that’s all very well. It’s all very fine, it’s all very fine being charitable at other people’s expense——”

“Fine indeed! and a fine time I’ve had of it ever since it was laid on my door-step; and, talking of the expense, who’s done the paying? Between cabs and lost time and the worry of it all it’s me that’s done the paying, not that I’m complaining, God knows, for, talking of charity, what charity could you put your hand to better?”

Miss Hancock, who had taken her seat, did not reply for a moment.

The fact that he had turned the flat into an excellent Charitable Institution was a point that did not appeal to her. She did not propose to subscribe to it anyhow.

“Well,” she said at last, “there’s one thing certain, it’s got to go away from here; there are plenty of good motherly women who would look after it, money need be no object. Once we can make her see sense and agree to part with it——”

“And there you are,” said he, “who’s to make her?”

He had hit the nail on the head. She knew Julia intimately, or thought she did; anyhow, she knew enough of her to recognise the something mule-stubborn in her nature that refused advice, refused suggestions, such as to come to Ireland and join in housekeeping at Castle Hancock and live like a Christian instead of in an old flat in Bloomsbury, of all places in the world; the something that had made her quarrel and refuse to be reconciled with young Coghill (a splendid match he would have been) and take up with that filthy dog that ought to have been put to sleep by the vet. long before nature, no doubt disgusted, did the job and chloroformed this substitute for a fine young man with five thousand a year and a good old family at his back.

Nature who, no doubt, as a grim joke, had tossed into her lap this baby that might have been young Coghill’s.

Something like this passing through the mind of the lady must have been reflected in the expression of her face to judge by O’Flynn’s tone when he spoke.

“If you’re in a hole,” said he, “there’s no use in digging deeper to get out by way of Australia; there’s always a back door to things in my experience if you can only find it, and I believe I’ve found one; your own words put it into my mind.”

“Yes?”

“A nice motherly woman—only she’ll have to live here in the flat.”

Miss Hancock groaned.

“And suppose you did get such a person,” said she, “she would only be a nurse, would that stop people from talking?”

“Wait a minute,” said he, a new idea coming to him, “you’re right, it wouldn’t, not if she was alive, but I’ve got something better than that. Now will you go and call in Margaret and I’ll explain my meaning—go on now, and don’t be asking me questions.”

She went out and fetched the woman.

“Margaret,” said he, when the door was closed, “your sister’s dead.”

“Sure, I haven’t any sister,” said Margaret.

“Don’t be interrupting me. She’s dead and her husband’s dead, killed in a tramcar accident, and Miss Corkran has let you take in her only child to look after it till you can hear from the grandfather living in Australia what’s to be done with it.”

“Oh, that’s your meanin’, is it?” said Margaret.

“Yes, that’s my meaning. Sure, you know what the world is and how it talks if you give it half a chance and turns and twists things till you don’t know which is the head or the tail—and it’s mostly the tail—and it’s the same with the thing I dropped into her lap, as you may say, and she not asking for it—but you’re a grown woman and know my meaning. You can’t get it away from her now, so we’ll just have to explain it away to the people—are you listening to me?”

“Sure, of course, I’m listenin’ to you—but it’s known all over County Dublin I was born an orphan, and if anyone goes over to Ireland and axes questions——”

“Let them—and I’ve got an idea, it’s not your sister but your half-sister is dead—let them go hunt for her, you might have a dozen half-sisters living in County Wexford, let alone County Dublin for the matter of that. Are you listening to me?”

“Sure, of course, I’m listenin’ to you.”

“Well, go on listening some more. That blessed bassinette must go into your bedroom, it’s next to hers. Thank God for whoever invented flats, for a houseful of servants would have done us. It must go into your bedroom——”

“Take a bone from a dog——”

“I’ll see to that, I’ll go in now and talk sense to her and make her see the position—we’ll see her now, we’ve got the thing early and that’s half the battle, same as with pneumonia; nobody knows, how about that lift-boy?”

“Tsha! He’s a fool.”

“Well, thank God for fools, and it’s not the first time I’ve said it.”

“How about the woman who comes in to do the cooking?” cut in Miss Hancock.

“She’s deaf and only comes to cook the dinner and wash up the plates.”

“Well, you’d better get her an ear trumpet,” said O’Flynn, “and tell her all about your half-sister, smell an onion to set your water-works going—and that’s about all, but it’s as well to stop up the little holes, for it’s those that sometimes sink a ship. Miss Hancock, here, will attend to the big ones.”

“Thank you,” said Miss Hancock.

“Oh, I only meant just saying to people that matter how your niece has let Margaret bring her half-sister’s orphan child to live here until it can get a better home—and now if you will wait here I’ll go and have it out with her.”

He left the room with Margaret, and Miss Hancock sat with her hands folded in her lap contemplating the pattern of the carpet. She was also contemplating the form and features and general make-up of O’Flynn.

He was the fountain and origin of all the trouble, he had taken the situation out of her hands and dominated her, a thing she was not used to at all, he was carelessly dressed and had the top of a fountain pen sticking out of his waistcoat pocket, and had little of the fashionable doctor about him and yet somehow or other the vision of him failed to displease her.

He was good-looking, and she had a fine eye for good looks in man, woman, horse or other beast, but it wasn’t that—it was just himself.

What made Julia Hancock a terror to her relations and surroundings was her managing ways; that she had a warm heart no one could deny. If you were broken and in distress you might be sure she would take you in—and do for you.

“Let her put a foot in your cabin and she’ll give you all she’s got, but you won’t get her out again till she’s tore the place down with her cleanin’ and mendin’ and makin’ different.”

Well, although O’Flynn had opposed her will and got the better of her, in a way, and although there was no suggestion (at least for the present) of cleanin’ and mendin’ and makin’ him different, she received him on his return to the room in a not unkindly spirit—anyhow she listened to him.

“Well, that’s done,” he said, shutting the door, “and I’ve made her see reason (‘reason,’ indeed, thought she). It all comes from her not seeing what people might say, and upon my word, I never thought of it myself till you came and took it like that—anyhow, it’s well you came—and now I must be off for I’ll be losing a surgery full of people waiting for me, and half my day’s work not done.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, “It’s all very unfortunate. I think it must have been Providence that sent me here to-day, or who knows what might have happened in the way of talk and trouble. However, I’ll do my best—you’ll come and see her to-morrow I suppose.”

“Yes,” he said, “I’ll come and see her to-morrow,” and off he went.

He returned to Endell Street on foot to clear his head; only to receive the news from Biddy that he was wanted urgent in Paradise Row for Mrs. Clayhanger. “And that’s forceps,” said he, “fetch my bag,” and off he went with it to assist into Paradise Row another little Clayhanger.

It was like that all the time. When he’d have finished with Mrs. Clayhanger, if she didn’t clayhang on too long, he’d find a surgery full of patients to be attended to; if she did, they would be fretful and impatient patients.

All the time, and how he kept his courage and cheerfulness together it is difficult to say. But he did.

Perhaps it was just the work. The work that kept Pelagon labouring at the oar yet interested in the sight of dolphins, the work that keeps miners labouring in the pits yet interested in the sight of whippets. Work is the only narcotic without a hangover that enables men to endure the ‘severe operation of living.’ The unemployed are robbed of this drug, and that is what makes their case so really desperate.

All the same and however that may be, and in the case of Flynn (I am going to rob him of his decorative O’ in future, for the sake of brevity) the narcotic failed a bit at times. He was a man of parts; a Trinity College, Dublin, man with an M.D. of Trinity, which is one of the finest degrees in the world, a man with a classical education, a friend of Mahaffy’s, and a member of the Irish Literary Society—yet you will say he was working in the slums!

Yes, and by preference.

When he came over from Ireland he had tried out a partnership with a friend, Dr. O’Malley, of Clapham; the trial only lasted nine months. The middle classes were too much for him; a most boring and depressing lot, and, not only that, but exiguous.

They had to be talked to as well as doctored; a rapid and skilful diagnostician, he could dart into a slum dweller’s cave and do his business in five or ten minutes or less, trapped in a middle-class bedroom he would be lucky to get out under twenty and then, most likely, he would be caught into a drawing-room or parlour to discuss the symptoms, to say nothing of the weather, with the relatives of the diseased.

So it happened that after nine months of this business he broke his partnership with Dr. O’Malley and bought the practice of Dr. O’Leary in Endell Street, going down the ladder, as you may say, but to a warmer and more human natural atmosphere. All the same he had gone down.

And there were moments when this fact came to him, moments created by cabbage stalks and gin-drinking ladies and the squalling of little Clayhangers, no less than by words of enquiry from the two or three really upper class, if Irish, patients that he had picked up and who clung to him, knowing his worth both as a doctor and a man.

Always the same enquiry: “Why don’t you come to the West End?” to which he would likely reply, “Sure, what would a general practitioner like me be doing in the West End?”

To which they would reply by exhibiting the luminous picture of what Dr. George Bird, to say nothing of others like Dr. Edward Furber, were doing in the West End.

Bird, unlike Furber, no longer with us, was doing a lot in the West End; not as a specialist with his nose stuck in a specialism or a consultant sitting like a spider in the web of his consulting-room, but, like Furber, as a warm-hearted man with a genius for his job bringing his warmth and light into the lives of men and women badly needing light and warmth.

It was Bird who used to hunt for Algernon Swinburne when Algy was seized with one of his fits of artistic-alcoholic insanity and bring him back to his people, like a deflated Pegasus to be pumped up for Dolores or Mencken, to ride about town, with all the Robert Buchanans running behind lashing at his rump only to be kicked in their faces.

But that was long ago and before the fiery steed was lassoed by Watts and stabled for good and all in Putney.

Now, Julia Corkran, when you got her away from neuralgia and dogs and out of the Celtic twilight, was by no means an unpractical person, and it was she who had started the invitation to ‘be a bird and see life,’ friends, whom she had infected with the same idea, assisting. Much good! They might have gone on harping forever with the same effect and the object of their attention gone on with his way of life in Endell Street had not Noreen Ginnis deposited Pat for a moment on his door-step, had he not deposited the same Pat in the flat of Miss Corkran, had not Jane Hancock come to London.

That same evening, whilst he was dealing with the Clayhanger business, Jane, who had taken off her hat, was seated with Julia in the pleasant sitting-room whilst Margaret was preparing a light supper for them out of some cold odds and ends in the little kitchen. Pat, in his bassinette in Margaret’s bedroom, was asleep—anyhow, he was not vocal.

They were discussing Irish matters of small local interest.

I wonder have I presented Jane to you with the light fully thrown on the managerial instinct and power that had managed old James Brady out of his pokey but successful little shop and into a much better shop in Cloyne: “Where you’ll have more light and air than in this dirty little place and do twice the business,” and so landed him in the bankruptcy court. The power that had managed the guardians into adopting a new ventilation scheme for the workhouse producing for results draughts, howls from the paupers, and a penny on the rates.

It wasn’t that she was a meddler or a muddler, just one of those women with a passion for putting things and people straight, according to her own way of thinking and always for the best; but only if they interested her.

Flynn had interested her.

Maybe his good looks had something to do with it, or the fact that he was the only man, since Colonel Grampound stopped her from plugging his water supply from the seven acres, who had ever got the better of her. Anyhow, the fact remained that she had suddenly taken an interest in Flynn. Just as she had in old Brady, Martha Trollope, Maria Crimmin, and others whose destinies she had altered if not improved.

To-night, as I have indicated, she was discussing Irish matters and things in general with her niece and enjoying the comfortable fire that Margaret had lit, less on account of the weather, which had turned warm, than on the principle (Irish) that three is company if the third party is a fire.

The conversation between the two ladies avoided Pat. He was not absent from their minds, but they did not talk about him; all the same, Flynn, the author of his being, in a manner of speaking, came into the talk after a while, led by Jane.

“How long has he been your doctor? Yes, I remember, you had old Dr. Goodenough, but I didn’t know he was dead; he practised in Wimpole Street, didn’t he—where does Dr. Flynn practise—but, my dear, that’s an awful place! I remember going to Long Acre years ago about the barouche we got from there and I’ve never forgotten it and it’s so far from here.”

“I know,” said Julia, “but it’s just him. He likes the poor people; he told me he had tried practising at Streatham, I think it was, but he couldn’t stand the well-to-do people there——”

“Shows his sense.”

“But I told him it would be quite different if he came to the West End, round about Harley Street. The Gordons told him the same. Old Mr. James Gordon—he cured him of the gout—said that he’d be a great success and told about him to Lady Poyns, she’s a cousin of Mr. Gordon’s son’s wife, she was one of the Forsythes, you remember Julia Forsythe who married Sir Julian Plender—and she had him, and it would have gone on like that only for him—not that I would have him be different from what he is, for he really does love the poor.”

“Love the rubbish,” said Miss Hancock.

She brooded for a moment over the case of Dr. Flynn.

She was a quick woman and she had sized him up with all his potentialities and possibilities, not to say impossibilities. Now, there is one thing one may say with almost certainty, that whilst it is impossible to sum up the ordinary man at short notice and say of that he would make a successful piano tuner or shopman or dentist or lawyer or solicitor or sea captain or purser, pig breeder or seller of Hoovers, it is possible very often to say of a doctor that he is likely to be a successful doctor in the higher walks of doctoring and amidst upper circle patients. I am not talking of surgery, mind you, for success in surgery is no more predictable by manner and appearance than success in carpentry, I am talking of medicine.

Miss Hancock had, besides a good deal of native perception, a considerable experience of the animals that, from their various and varied exhibitions of mind, are called Medicals; from old Dr. Humlin of Cloyne, who had all but killed her mother with a black draught sent in mistake for a sleeping mixture, to D’Ath, of Merrion Square, then all the fashion, despite the tale that his real name, as christened, was Death.

“I don’t want to say anything against the poor,” she went on, “but it seems to me it’s a poor spirit in a man that chooses to settle down among them unless of course he’s a priest or a parson—but I think it’s just want of initiative. I think he just wants rousing.”

And so the matter dropped, and Miss Hancock might have dropped Flynn from her mind and troubled about him no more only for a person who didn’t want rousing if his milk bottle wasn’t to his liking or if the wind was a trouble to him—Pat, no less.

From the bedroom of Margaret there suddenly came a sound, a growling sound that rose to the note of lamentation, sank, ceased, and then became a bellow. The first of a series that made Julia jump from her chair and rush from the room.

The listener sat listening to the voices coming now from Margaret’s room. The bellowing had ceased.

“Going and leaving the blanket off him like that!”

“I tell you I didn’t, he must have kicked it off him,” and so on.

But what made Miss Hancock think was, not so much the war-like, as the proprietary note in the tone of the two ladies, as of two incensed mothers at variance. That neither was the mother made the matter all the more ominous. ‘And if this sort of thing goes on,’ thought Miss Hancock. Then she gave over thinking for listening.

Flynn’s business premises, as is the case of many other cash practices, had once been a shop. It had been a grocer’s and the window that had once displayed tea at two shillings a pound and margarine and great jars of appalling looking yellow pickles warranted to bite, if not by label or word of mouth, tins of sardines of no important brand, of so said salmon, of bully beef and bottles of Worcestershire sauce that had never heard of Lea and knew nothing of Perrins, now showed only a brown painted space of glass written across with the word ‘Surgery’ done in letters of gold.

When you passed the once shop door and entered the surgery you found yourself in the once shop whose counter had been removed and whose once counting-house had been converted into a consulting-room.

There were cane-bottomed chairs and you sat about on them with others of your kind waiting your turn and never squabbling for precedence. The poor people who attended Flynn, like the poor people who stand in queues, were possessed of that sense of order and elementary justice more remarkable perhaps in the lower than the higher strata of the nation, also getting in to see the doctor had less appeal than getting in to see a play, also there was something of a social atmosphere in the waiting-room that had a holding effect.

It would be hard to imagine the patients in a Harley Street waiting-room becoming acquainted through the introductions of natural diseases, yet such introductions were not infrequent in the waiting-room in Endell Street where you might have often seen ladies matching rheumatisms and so forth and not only symptoms but treatment; or just gossiping. Not men; the male patients, such as they were, held, as a rule, each to himself and if any dirty work was to be done in the way of getting in to see the doctor out of turn it was generally done by a man. I don’t know why.

One bright morning some ten days after the events described in the last chapter a hansom cab drew up in Endell Street and out of it got Miss Hancock, her purse in her hand.

Having disputed the fare with the cab man and put the purse in her pocket she cast about her for the place she wanted. She hadn’t far to look.

Biddy was beating a mat at the side door which gave entrance to the upstairs living-rooms—the same door where Pat had been deposited.

“Yes, m’am,” said Biddy dropping her mat and mat beating. “He’s just finishing off with the surgery, but if you’ll step upstairs I’ll tell him and he’ll be up with you in a minute.”

She rolled down her sleeves and led the way in up an uncarpeted stairs to the landing above.

Here she opened a door and the visitor found herself in the sitting-room of the doctor.

It was not uncarpeted like the stairway; a good, though perhaps past better days, Turkey carpet covered the floor and the furniture was adequate. There were flowers in a vase.

Flynn rarely bought flowers. They were given to him.

One of the charming things about the poor is their love and appreciation of flowers. The flower in a pot is sometimes the only light-giving thing in many a poverty-stricken room. Flowers are light.

But these were not pot flowers, just a bunch for the doctor from some patient who had a hand maybe in Covent Garden Market as well as a foot in Sardinia Street or Drury Lane.

There were several pictures on the walls (photographs). One of Lucius Gwynn in white flannels, batting in the College Park, Dublin, another of A.E. by Count Markiewicz reproduced from the portrait in the Dublin Municipal Art Gallery.

On the mantel there were several invitation cards; to a meeting of the Irish Literary Society, which Miss Hancock glanced at through a suddenly put-up pair of pince-nez, to a meeting of the Clanna something or another which she dismissed with a ‘tcha’ and a card of invitation to what seemed from the names an Anarchist tea party in Greek Street, Soho.

The idea that Flynn might be a Fenian to the tips of his fingers (which he was) would not have troubled Miss Hancock, or the suggestion that he looked with a mild eye on the antics of the anarchistically minded gentlemen who were always trying to blow up the Czar. What troubled her was the dust on the marble of the mantelpiece. She laid one finger on it, looked at the finger and then, seeing an old duster, left by Biddy on top of the coal-scuttle, picked it up.

Half a minute later the door opened and in came Flynn and caught her at it.

“Don’t you know as a doctor,” said she, after explanations, “that dust is the main cause of diseases?”

“And sure what would doctors be doing if there wasn’t any diseases?” asked he, “and talking of dust it’s natural in these old houses, you should see the attics.”

“Well, I don’t want to see the attics. I came to see you. I’m bothered about my niece.”

“Take a seat—in what way?”

“The child.”

“Oh, that,” said he.

“And it’s not so much the child as Margaret and it’s not so much Margaret as my niece.”

“And in what way?”

“They’re quarrelling over it.”

“But sure—”

“Maybe quarreling is too hard a word—but can’t you understand—it’s like two old gentlemen in the village near where I live, their houses were adjoining and there was a garden common to each and they were always quarrelling as to what sort of flowers would be planted in it and that kind of thing; but this is much worse, you see they aren’t two old gentlemen with a garden.”

“Faith, that’s true,” said he.

“Of course,” she went on, “a person of my niece’s position does not quarrel with a servant. I shouldn’t have used the word, perhaps; but it’s just this, neither of them are mothers, and yet—”

“I know,” said he, “I’ve got you entirely, they both want to mother it.”

“It’s not a question of wanting to, they do it, and that’s what makes the trouble. Only yesterday Margaret gave the wretched thing a piece of sugar in a rag to suck and keep it quiet, you can fancy!”

He could.

And he could have fancied the most terrible things for the helpless child suddenly reborn into the world and into the hands of two foster mothers only that he knew that babies are fairly indestructible by mishandling else there wouldn’t be any of them left. What was bothering him was the idea of the two helpless women who had suddenly, and so to speak, had a child between them and the fact that he was the author of the business, if not of its being.

It was a new sort of eternal triangle. If he was not physically the father of the same child by two women he was anyhow likely to have all the worries and responsibilities of father-hood without any of the preparatory pleasure. A raw deal as you may say. He foresaw waste of time and irritation—as if he hadn’t enough on his shoulders already.

“So you see how it is,” said Miss Hancock.

“Oh, I see it all right. If one could cut the thing in two, same as old Solomon did and give each of them a half to nurse and play about with—but one can’t. I don’t know I’m sure; but I tell you what I’ll do, I’ll come round when I have a minute’s time this evening and try and drive some sense into Margaret’s head. The thing isn’t hers anyway, it wasn’t to her I gave it.”

“No, but you suggested putting it in her bedroom, that’s what’s done the mischief.”

“And there you go. Didn’t I do it because of what you said about this scandal nonsense?”

“Scandal isn’t nonsense.”

And so they went on, no temper however being lost as though they were old friends with a little difference between them—they were both Irish.

“Well,” she said at last, “the thing’s done and can’t be undone; anyhow you’ll come to-night and see Margaret. It’s a pity you aren’t living closer; have you ever thought of coming to practise in our part of the town?”

“You mean the West End?”

“Yes.”

Flynn laughed.

“It’s not a question of my thinking but of my friends thinking for me,” said he, “Miss Corkran has been at me about it and her friends the Gordons, to say nothing of my own people when they come over from Ireland. Well it’s just a question of money more or less; it’s easy to say to a man make a fresh start and maybe land him in the workhouse—you remember what Æsop said about the dog that was carrying a piece of meat across a river.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Sure, where were you born? He saw it reflected in the water and made a grab at the reflection and lost it.”

Miss Hancock, who had no use for fables and fancies, pursed her lips.

“There’s such a thing as being too cautious,” said she, “and anyhow you’re not a dog with a piece of meat but a doctor with a—well I’m sure I don’t know what’s getting hold of me to be talking like this, but all the same it seems a pity.”

“You see,” said Flynn, “the bother of being what they call a fashionable doctor—”

“Nonsense, be an unfashionable doctor practising in a fashionable street. That’s the sort of thing that takes the town as Dr. Mulcahy took Dublin; Plant and Smily and old Dominic Corrigan were the three lights till Mulcahy came and nearly snuffed them out. He didn’t care a button what he said to anyone (same as you don’t, from what I can tell of you) and that’s what people want. They want a man more than a doctor, especially the women, and he’d have made his fortune only he took to drink.”

“And maybe I’d be doing the same,” said the other, wishing that the woman would go, for he had patients to visit before lunch and the time was getting on.

All the same, she had made her mark. If you keep harping on the same string you will likely either break the string or play some sort of tune.

The string that had been harped on by the Corkran-Gordon-Stitchley syndicate had not broken because the attempted tune set up no antagonistic vibrations; stretching from Sardinia Street to Cavendish Square all the vibrations were towards the Square; all the same nothing had happened much in the way of music.

But to-day, somehow it was different. This new musician was different from the others.

The fact that Jane Hancock had begun to deal with him in her own peculiar fashion same as the potter deals with the clay was not apparent, anyhow to him, all the same she had left him a bit different from what she had found him and she had kept him so long with her talk that he had no time to visit the couple of pre-luncheon patients he had intended to see. Instead he sat down to the chop and boiled potato Biddy had served up, not much of a luncheon to talk about but better in its way than many a more costly meal, for Biddy could boil a potato, also, as in the case of many Irish servants of her grade and age, she knew how to buy and the chop was a chop, not a bone with a bit of tough meat and gristle on it.

One of the pitiable things about the poor is the way they are served by the great god Trade. Flynn had sometimes pondered this subject. The third-rate shops sold cheap, seemingly, but were the goods really cheap?

Only a little while ago he had wanted to buy a vest and pair of underpants for an old gentleman in Cassidys Rents to face the winter with (he sometimes did a bit of private philanthropizing like this), and he found that the things offered to him as woollen garments were mostly cotton and by extension of observation and enquiry he found that it was the same in the other little shops. No wonder his surgery was packed with rheumatic patients. The fish shops of the district showed him Fynnon haddocks not much bigger than the palm of his hand and with not much on them. No relations, one might fancy, of the great two inch thick Fynnon haddocks served at the breakfast tables of the Ritzians; yet they were—but poor relations.

The butchers’ shops told the same tale about meat and the grocers’ shops continued the same story with their tins of second and third grade salmon.

The chop before him to-day bought by Biddy from Jackson’s, a high-class butcher’s at the Strand end of Drury Lane, seemed to cast reflections on these matters of food and raiment, just as Jane Hancock had cast reflections not on the poor but on poverty and the conduct of a doctor who chose to spend his life rubbing noses with poverty, whatever he might feel about the poverty-stricken ones.

Jane and the chop between them seemed telling him things and the visiting list, which he had put on the table to glance at as he ate, was not improving the talk.

Old Mrs. Cary of Rafferty’s Rents was not a cheerful sendoff for the afternoon’s work. She lived in a cellar and was quite happy, her only grief and torment being the fear of eviction, for the authorities, just then, were turning their minds on the question of the widening of Drury Lane and the Rents were on the bill for destruction.

No, the lamentations of Mrs. Cary as to the probable loss of her home and happiness were not in the order of things to look forward to, nor the sure refusal of Mr. Mullins, a well-to-do publican of the Lane afflicted with gin-drinkers’ liver, to stop gin drinking and try and save what was left of his liver.

However, there was no use in bothering, and having finished luncheon he started off on his afternoon’s work ending the day at half past six o’clock in Cunningham Mansions.

Margaret was in and her mistress was in and Pat was in Margaret’s room also, in his bassinette and asleep—at all events he wasn’t shouting. Perfect peace reigned in the Mansion and Julia was seated in an arm-chair by the fire engaged in needlework.

‘At all events she’s off that confounded couch,’ thought the visitor.

He remembered the evening not so very long ago when he had found her on the couch reading poetry and still under shadow of grief for the departed dog. Not that he ridiculed her for that. He knew quite well that love is a secretion of the mind and that if it doesn’t escape it is apt to turn sour and poison the whole system, mentally as well as bodily, and that’s why a dog or a cat acting as a conduit saves many an individual from becoming sour through suppressed love.

Well, Pat was doing the business now, only it was plain to be seen that the conduit was a bit blocked and that Margaret was the object blocking it.

However, he did not say a word on that subject till she introduced it in a vague sort of way with a statement about the sugar and rag business.

“Good gracious,” said he, “well, that sort of thing must be stopped. You leave it to me and I’ll have a word with her. I’ll see her when I’m going out.” And he did.

“Now look here, Margaret,” said he, getting her into the little room near the entrance and closing the door, “I want to have a word with you.”

The finish of the conversation was definite and short.

“Well, there you have it. I’ve got your promise to leave the thing alone and not be sticking your thumb in the business. It’s Miss Julia’s, not yours, and if I have any more trouble in the matter I’ll just come and take it away and stick it in the workhouse.”

Then he went off on his employment, maybe to bring some new baby in, or help some old person out of the great workhouse we call the world.

In another work I have permitted myself to say that the only road to Harley Street is the floor of a hospital ward and to hint that the ward isn’t done with when you get to your destination.

Most doctors, having qualified, no longer walk a hospital, they walk into a private practice or a service one, as the case may be. But your Harley Street man has to continue his hospital walk; he must continue to treat hospital patients else he could not have the status that enables him to treat millionaires; the status of a fashionable physician or surgeon in the West End of London.

Leaving aside other considerations, the main advantage of this high position is the fact that he has not to send out bills.

He gives no credit.

All the same there are other medical men, though very few, that come into the West End, yea, even into Harley Street, and pitch their tents and practices—and send in bills.

Getting on the perch beside the Specialists, so to speak, attending the same class of patients, though not getting such high fees—still, on the perch.

So it was in the days of Edward Rex. To-day I don’t know, but I expect it is just the same to-day.

Now the elevation of Dr. Flynn to that high position from the low ground of Endell Street might have remained an idea in the industrious brain of Jane Hancock but for several energetic factors all working obscurely but in unison and in common.

Leaving aside the advice of the Corkran-Gordon-Stitchley combination there was the fact that, though a victim of the inertia inseparable from all motionless and moving bodies, he was not without ambition.

Leaving aside that, life in Endell Street had been telling on him.

Hard work had left him little time for thinking, all the same he had times for thought.

The thing had been growing on him with the fact that he had over eight hundred pounds in the bank to back him should he decide to make a daring move, and that the sale of the Endell Street practice would bring him in another substantial sum, when one day a note arrived from the indefatigable Jane, who was still in London.

Just that.

But received after his return from a trying case; Mrs. Cowslip, of Paradise Court, to whom the stork had brought a sixth little Cowslip, and she without any visible means of support except a drunken husband.

The note was received at luncheon time.

“Biddy,” said he to the lady who had just served the meal. “They are bothering me to chuck this place and take a practice in the West End where all the rich people are.”

“And who’s axing you to do that?” asked Biddy, dish-cover in hand.

“Oh, Miss Corkran and Miss Hancock and a lot of other people who seem to know more about my affairs than I do myself.”

“And maybe they do,” said Biddy, “and if they don’t who’s to say they aren’t right. Sure I’ve been thinking it often myself. Seeing them boys rowling about in their carriages and you better than the lot of them footin’ it about amongst this trash.”

The matter had evidently long been in her mind and the thesis not dictated to her by any other than the genius that spoke often in her actions and through her mouth. The genius of crude common sense, the common sense of the peasant and, often in Ireland, of the priest. Like old Miss Holden, Biddy rarely attempted to give advice directly, but this was an exception to the rule, and the effect none the less potent for that.

“Yes, it’s all very well,” he said, “but carriages take keeping and rents up there are different from here; what you make with one hand you pay away with the other.”

“And who’s going to make without spendin’?” asked she. “If you want herring you must put out sprats; only in these parts it’s nothing but sprats you’re catching.”

“Well maybe,” said he, and she went off with the dish-cover, having done her bit.

If you have ever watched beavers building dams, which you possibly haven’t, you will have observed that the structural result (leaving aside the possible flooding and destruction of a homestead) is the result, less of animal skill in carpentry than of the fact that each one is doing its bit. Also, and in relation to the story, you will observe that the beavers building the great Flynn dam to flood a doctor out of Endell Street and make him climb higher up the bank to improve his position were all females. The three Fates were females.

However, dam building is never swift work, and it was not till a week after the foregoing conversation that a really important log came drifting along to assist the business; a Doctor Casey, no less, a Trinity College friend of Flynn’s over from Ireland to examine London as a field for his medical activities.

He was six feet four (they grow people big in Ireland) and quite a character, though not perhaps a social one. His luggage was limited to a Gladstone bag (still in fashion), and when he stopped for the night at Flynn’s before returning to Dublin after his visit of Metropolitan inspection Biddy discovered that he’d neither night-gown nor pyjamas.

“He sleeps in his shirt,” said Biddy to herself though uncritically, just as a matter of comment; though he was not too poor to buy one, tipping her, as he did, five shillings on his departure.

The Caseys, in fact, were well-to-do if a bit negligent in some things.

Old Casey owned, in fact, a most prosperous grocer’s business in Liffey Street, calling himself Casey and Company, and had given his son a good education at Trinity to make a gentleman of him, which he couldn’t do, for Aloysius (so he was christened) was a gentleman by nature, even though neglectful sometimes of small matters that have little to do with true gentility.

“Faith, you have a nice little practice here,” said Aloysius, stretching his awful length in Flynn’s most comfortable arm-chair and flicking cigarette ash on the floor, “and what might your takings be, if I may ask?——well, that’s not so bad either. I’ve been going over practices with the medical agents in Adam Street, and there’s not one I’d touch with a barge pole, between the prices they’re asking and the things they’re trying to sell; away in the outskirts, most of them, and here you are in the heart of London with everything to your hand, theatres and all.”

“People are bothering me to leave here and go up West,” said Flynn.

“Well, if you do,” said the other, evidently fascinated by the delights and amenities of Endell Street. “Let’s know. I’d be willing to give you a thousand for it. What’s the rent of the house, may I ask?”

Flynn told and next morning Dr. Casey departed for Dublin.

But the log was in place.

Messrs. Kingdom and Crowninshaw were the chief house agents in the West End of London in the later Victorian period and in the times stretching to the close of the Edwardian era.

Their offices were in Albemarle Street, an Albemarle Street sanctified by the house of John Murray, an Albemarle Street that would have thrown up its hands in horror at the word ‘shop’ used in a general way and connected with the word ‘front.’

It is true there was Lewis and Parker’s the tailors just beyond the house of John Murray and several other places that sold things such as old prints and rare jewellery without shouting, also a couple of discreet agencies including Kingdom and Crowninshaw, that, from appearance, might have been a high-class religious institution, but wasn’t. No, Kingdom and Crowninshaw were not in business to sell Bibles though Thurgood, their chief of staff and sales manager was of the type that can sell anything it puts its hands on.

He sold No. — Thurlow Square. Refusing to consider fantastic tales about its being haunted he sold it three times in as many years; ground rents did not seem to exist when he was dealing with houses and, as for lets, he had the reputation of being able to let anything.

Dr. Julius Parsloe, wishing to let his rooms in Harley Street and continue his practice elsewhere, put the matter into the hands of Mr. Thurgood and this morning to Mr. Thurgood appeared Dr. Flynn.

Thurgood at once appealed to Flynn. Success in life connotes other factors than cleverness. Thurgood might be as clever as Satan in carrying on his works, but it was his seemingly genial and understanding nature that formed his appeal, and without appeal a house agent is as useless as a woman in the same condition.

A house does not sell or let itself, it is let, or sold, and Mr. Thurgood, a gentleman of forty or so, stout, well dressed and always carrying a neatly rolled Briggs umbrella, had amongst other qualifications for the business that of frankness.

He did not hide ghosts, he laughed them out of existence; he could not hide dry rot but would frankly exhibit it as the only stain (easily removable) that increased, by contrast, the desirability of what he was offering.

“Take a chair,” said he, sitting down, having risen from his desk. “Take a chair. Now, let me see, Dr. Parsloe’s rooms; yes, they are in our hands.” He looked at the visiting card that had been brought in to him and then at the visitor. “Yes, he holds them on a yearly tenancy which expires some three months from now, he has been there some seven years or so and is giving them up for rooms in Cavendish Square, I think it is.” He looked again at the card. “You are proposing to practise in this part of the town?”

“Well, it’s this way,” said Flynn. “My friends want me to come up here, and I have been thinking of it, it’s a big change but I’m not so sure that I won’t; but I haven’t quite decided yet. It’s not all roses where I am now,” said he, led to the confession by the genial and understanding manner of the other.

Thurgood laughed.

“Well, roses aren’t much mixed up with business in my experience,” said he. “Except in the case of florists. To be frank, our business does not stretch Endell Street way. Pretty poor the people are round there—arn’t they?”

“Well, it’s not that that’s making me think about leaving, it’s just the place; the people are all right, poor as they may be, but it’s the district. Funny, when I came to London first (I’m Irish) I didn’t notice it. You see, Dublin is none too cheerful or clean——”

“Dear, dirty Dublin?”

“Maybe; but you should see the children running about on their bare feet, on the banks of the Liffey! anyhow, the Endell Street district didn’t seem to me any too bad—better than Clapham where I went first, but it’s been growing on me.”

“You mean—”

“I mean I didn’t notice it for a long time and maybe wouldn’t have, only for people talking to me and telling me I ought to get out of it and come up West.”

Thurgood considered his visitor for a moment. He was a house agent, not a medical agent. Still he knew enough about medical practice in London to recognize that this proposition was like that of a man selling winkles in Drury Lane who proposes to sell oysters in Piccadilly.

But that was outside his business. Houses were his business and dealing with them he was not much weighed down with the burden of conscience. But this was not so much the question of letting a man a house with a leaky roof, but the question of letting a man maybe ruin himself in a new venture.

In the case of houses, Mr. Thurgood was as amoral as a horse dealer in the case of horses; but I have known horse dealers quite sympathetic towards their fellow men and maybe this house dealer had something of that softness, for he checked for a moment, but only for a moment.

According to his visitor’s card he was well qualified, anyhow an M.D., he had a taking manner and pleasant face, not the face, anyhow, that enters a patient’s room looking like the prelude to a funeral.

Well did he know from observation of London life that it’s the old Dr. Goodenough who gets the goods even though he may be a bit deaf, that it’s less the medical in a medical man that makes for success than the man.

So instead of saying, “Don’t” he leaned back in his chair and said, “Well, you certainly would be making a change.”

“That’s true,” said Flynn.

Then, recognizing the friendly spirit of the other:

“What would you advise? You know all about London.”

Thurgood laughed, “Maybe less than you think, it’s like advising a man on the question of changing his business premises. William Whiteley had a poky little shop in Westbourne Grove, now he’s got a palace in Queen’s Road. He didn’t ask anyone’s advice, he advised himself. He wanted to expand, and did. Now as to Parsloe’s rooms; the rent is reasonable; you can have them on a yearly tenancy. The question of money has to do with nearly everything in the world and if you find you can afford the business you might try the thing out. I’m not advising you either way, but if you can sell your practice down in what’s its name street you could doubtless buy another if this venture were to fail. Have you a nucleus?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A nucleus of patients in this part of the town.”

Flynn told of the Corkran-Gordon combination without giving their names.

“Well, that’s something to go on,” said Thurgood, “nothing can grow without a nucleus to grow from. Well, if you would like to see the rooms our Mr. Stripe, the clerk that looks after this sort of thing, would run round with you if you care to give him a lift in a cab, for he is pretty busy just now. I’ll go and speak to him.”

“Yes,” said Flynn, “I may as well look at them.”

Thurgood left the room.

Our Mr. Stripe turned out to be a young man, fashionably attired; morning coat, striped trousers and all; yellow-haired, flat-faced with a waspish manner and a turn of wit that began to exhibit itself during the short cab journey to Harley Street.

Thurgood had evidently informed him about the subject of the business, for his conversation, such as it was, turned in that direction. He was one of those people who are frankly cynical about doctors and their ways, especially their higher ways, for his father was in the profession, though only a chloroformist, it is true; still a chloroformist called in here and there by the higher ones has fine opportunities for observing their ways and means, especially their means. He believed in high charges, did Mr. Stripe. Parsloe, who was taking a whole house in Cavendish Square was an example.

Parsloe, a skin doctor, said Mr. Stripe, was successful in life as well as in medical treatment because he did not leave his patients with any skins to be troubled with. “And they like it,” said he, “people like to be fleeced—anyhow they don’t think much of goods if they’re got cheap, anyhow they run after high prices. Look at this coat I’m wearing, got it from Aronson of Conduit Street a year ago, now he’s moved to Savile Row, charges double, same goods, no one objects because it’s Savile Row.”

“Parsloe’s is the basement, above him there’s a mind specialist, a Dr. Cherry. Harley Street is the funniest racket. My father who is in the profession told me all about it. Mr. Thurgood told me you are practising down Drury Lane way. You’ll find this place different if you come to it. You’re not a specialist, by any chance?”

“No, just a G.P.”

“Well, that makes you a bit out of it, as far as the money racket goes.”

“How’s that?”

“Oh, it’s just that all the specialists cling together. Parsloe, let’s put it, will say to one of the skin patients, ‘Let’s listen to your heart,’ and then will send him on to a heart specialist who’ll say, ‘Let’s look at your eyes,’ who’ll send him on to an eye specialist—and so the game goes on. All the same, an all-round man like you ought to get on all right, you see people are beginning to be about sick with this specialism business, reckoning that each of these chaps has his specialism on his brain. They want a chap with an all-round view.”

“You mean that?”

“Which?”

“That there’s room for an all-round man like myself.”

“Oh, yes, lots, if you get a few patients to start with and if you have money enough to hold on with while the thing is growing.”

The cab stopped and they got out.

The house situated on the left-hand side of Harley Street was little different from its fellows.

Harley, Wimpole and Welbeck Streets have all pretty much the same atmosphere of slight depression. The old London fogs, the fogs of yesteryear, seem to recall themselves if ever so slightly; when a real fog does happen to occur of a winter’s evening the atmosphere is Islington—only there is no muffin bell.

However, the atmosphere to-day was sunny and bright and the rooms of Dr. Parsloe seemed not uninviting. They consisted of a dining-room which did duty as a waiting-room, a consulting-room, two small bedrooms and a hole of a room which Dr. Parsloe called his library. There were book shelves in it but no books. There was no furniture, it had all been removed to Cavendish Square, so Flynn would have to furnish the place.

However, with the furniture from Endell Street and a few additions, this was not beyond him. But there was more than the rooms to be thought of, there was the basement, consisting of a kitchen and servants’ quarters.

Flynn, down in the kitchen, asked some questions which, being answered, revealed something of the natural history of the strange house.

Parsloe lived here entirely and so required the kitchen; Dr. Cherry, the man above, had a small kitchen of his own.

The man above Cherry only came in the daytime, and evidently lived on sandwiches.

But the kitchen did not put Flynn off, there were enough pots and pans at Endell Street to furnish it, to say nothing of Biddy.

Also there was a modern stove and the place seemed clean.

He agreed to the kitchen.

They had been let in by a pale-faced young man in livery. It turned out that he went with the rooms in a sort of way; Parsloe sharing him with Cherry.

He cost fifty pounds a year, each paid half so that Flynn’s share would be twenty-five pounds a year, which seemed reasonable, he being indispensable for the letting in of patients.

“I’ll think it over,” said Flynn as he parted from Mr. Stripe, “and let you know to-morrow.”

And on the morrow, having received a reply to a telegram to Dr. Casey, having sent Biddy in a cab to look at the kitchen, having had another look at his bank book, having debated in his mind Timotheus the black cat, rescued by him from the gutter, and Timotheus’ possible reactions to the environment of Harley Street, having decided that it would be all right if its feet were buttered, he sent a ’phone message to Messrs. Kingdom and Crowninshaw closing with the proposition.

Then he sat for a few minutes in his arm-chair to contemplate matters and smoke.

One blessed and not till now fully realised thing was the fact that he would not have to dispense his own medicines or depend on a dispenser like old Mr. Diplock, whose eye-sight had once betrayed him into dispensing calomel for bismuth, or young Holmes who had balanced his losses in betting with his profits from bottle filling—with the help of the till.

Yes, he could dispense with dispensers, and a fact not hitherto realised, he would have no drug bills to pay; his patients would pay their own drug bills by taking his prescriptions to a chemist to be made up.

No drug bills, no unpacking drugs from hampers full of straw; also no bottle bills and no unpacking from straw eight ounce, four ounce, one ounce bottles. Casey would be doing all that, Casey now preening his wings for flight in dear, dirty Dublin.

There were also to be paid by Dr. Casey bills for wrapping paper and sealing wax.

All the poorer patients accepted the fact that they would have to do without the luxury of wrapping paper for their medicine—all except one old lady of aristocratic tendencies who had resented the idea of carrying a ‘naked bottle’ through the streets, still there were other, better-to-do people who were accustomed to have their doctor’s stuff wrapped up, and the paper, sealing wax, string bill was one of the items that Dr. Casey was buying with his new venture.

Life is made up of items; so is a doctor’s practice, especially if his practice is situated in such a place as Endell Street. Trying to find flannel, sometimes, to wrap up new born babies, to say nothing of hot water to wash them in. Trying to stop people swallowing their liniments instead of their mixtures. Trying to get drunken gentlemen to reform from beating their lady wives, and wives to refrain from feeding children still in the milk stage, with bacon and beans. Trying, in the plum season when plums were hawked in barrows, to impress parents with the fact that whilst infantile diarrhœa cannot produce plums, plums may possibly produce infantile diarrhœa. Yes, these were just a few of the items that Dr. Casey was picking up along with his practice, and Flynn, as he sat smoking and considering them, felt no qualms, for Casey seemed a knowledgeable man as well as a kind-hearted and would doubtless fall into it all in a few weeks.

That evening Biddy who had been sent in a cab to inspect the kitchen and kitchen arrangements of the new deal returned critical but, on the whole, satisfied. The sink was no better than it ought to be and the stove was sure to make trouble, being one of them new patent humbugs. “And there beside it,” said she, “there’s a good ould-fashioned range big enough to roast an ox and ovens and all, and there beside it this bit of a thing all ’lictric plate ’namel-ware and lit be gas. I haven’t seen a decent range since here I come to England and the sight of it, same as the one I remember in Merrion Square when I was a girl and cook to Mrs. Boyle, made me sick to get back to it.”

Meaning, of course, back to Ireland.

Periodical attacks of home-sickness induced by old familiar sounds or smells or, as in this instance, sights, were not uncommon with the lady and, indeed, the same might be said of Flynn. However, he did not catch the disease in its present form, saved, maybe, by the not unhumorous picture of Parsloe cooking oxen whole or inciting his servants so to cook them.

“Well,” he said, “there’s no use in going back to old times, I remember the old ranges and the old chimneys, but I remember the trouble they used to give, like the ones in my Uncle James Flaherty’s house in Monaghan, which you couldn’t clean without putting a goose down them, either that or a boy up them with a brush. But tell me this, did you see the young chap in livery that opened the door to you?”

“Faith, I did,” said she, “and a piece of impudence he looked till I told him who I was and what I’d be doing in the house, when he shut up like a tiliscope and took me down to the basement to show me round.”

“He’s the chap that will open the door for patients and all that. I’m going shares in him with the doctor who has the upper part of the house.”

“Sure, I know that; he told me all about him; chatter! he never stopped chatterin’, wanted to know where you came from and I said Dublin; wanted to know what brought you to London and I told him the Markis of Watherford had axed you to come as he wouldn’t be doctored by anyone else. Tell that chap a thing and he’ll be all over the town telling it, so I give him something to tell.”

“Well, anyhow, you liked the kitchen?”

“I’m not sayin’ I liked it,” replied she, “but it will do.”

So that was all right.

A week later Dr. Casey arrived, some old luggage, but a cheque on the Royal Bank of Ireland for the purchase money in his pocket, also a Limerick ham in a canvas cover, a present from his father to Flynn.

Casey had agreed to take over all the furniture and fittings at a rough valuation of two hundred and fifty pounds and Flynn, with that behind him, had been able to give Shoolbreds an order for the furnishing of the Harley Street rooms.

This evening with all this accomplished he was giving the details to Julia Corkran. Julia, no longer a patient, cured of most of her wanting to love and be loved neuroses by Dr. Pat, sleeping now comfortably in his bassinette in Margaret’s room, was engaged on some knitting work. The fire was burning brightly and Margaret had just brought in afternoon tea.

Flynn was having a cup.

Not so long ago, if visiting her at tea time he would not be invited to share the meal. Could it be that the improvement in his social position that was just taking place had in some way improved their social relationship? Perish the thought, and, more charitably, let us imagine the humanising influence of Pat as the amending factor.

She had always been wanting Flynn to come West, say, to Welbeck or Wimpole Street, she had never visioned the heights of Harley Street as his resting place; it was Jane Hancock who, in talking the matter over with her, had plumped for the higher perch.

“But Harley Street!”

“Well, why not?” said Jane. “Old Parsloe was grumbling and snuffing about in Duke Street, I think it was. I wouldn’t let him doctor a cat, personally, if it had skin disease, and look at him now, taken a whole house in Cavendish Square which he wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t made a proper jump at first. Jane Parsloe told me all about their affairs, she’s one of those women who are always giving things away—except money; told me all about their pinchings and savings, and, of course, it was Jane made him do it, for she has some sense in that buzzy looking head of hers; though I believe it was I that put her on the right track.”

And undoubtedly it was, and Julia this afternoon as she dispensed tea to this budding Harleystreetian recognised, and not for the first time, the inevitability of Jane, when she took any matter in hand to do with the bettering or worsening of other people’s affairs.

Which is not so say that Julia had been inactive in the business.

She was very interested in the details being given now by her friend. After all, life is made up of details, and without them history, human and national, tends to lose interest. He gave her plenty; ranging from the kitchen furniture he was replacing to the attitude of Biddy towards the carpet he had chosen for the consulting-room. She had been sent to Shoolbreds to inspect it.

She had not boggled at the price, “Let the rest of the place go bare,” said she with the natural wisdom of her kind, “but don’t go scrimping your money over the consulting-room.”

Julia agreed.

Then, to change the subject, he asked after Pat, whose voice had suddenly come to them to be cut off and stilled by the soothing voice of Margaret.

Pat was all right, and then came to him as a revelation the fact that the tension between the two women about the child had ceased, and that Margaret was doing most of the bothering, if not the mothering of it.

After all his trouble putting Margaret in her proper place as to the possession of it, she had triumphed as regards the tendance of it, the washing of it, the feeding of it.

The peasant woman who had never had a child triumphed over the aristocratic woman who was in the same position.

Maybe nature had not cut Julia out for service of a practical kind, maybe Margaret was more cut out for the wearying duties that fall to a nurse—who can say? One thing was certain, Pat did not seem to care when Flynn, before his departure, was taken in to look at him.

“And now,” said Julia as she showed him out, “that you have got all your furniture settled you have nothing to do but just move in—and I do hope you will have all good luck.”

Nothing to do but just move in!

In the case of a lawyer changing his premises that would have been so, for a lawyer’s clients can follow him to his new business abode, even a fashionable doctor’s patients can follow him about the West End without crutches, but a cash doctor’s can’t.

The distance from Endell Street to Harley Street is only a mile and a half as the taxi cab plies, by foot, even with the aid of crutches, it is a thousand light years.

In parting with his patients Flynn would be parting with them for ever.

Of course, Gubbins, the well-to-do publican of Drury Lane, might take a cab to see his old doctor about his old complaint—alcoholic neuritis. Even that was doubtful, but as for the majority of his patients he would be parting with them for ever; and before leaving them for ever he would have to say good-bye to them. He did not want to do that. Nearly all of them were friends and had come to rely on him not only as a doctor but a friend, but he had to do it, simply because he had to introduce Dr. Casey to them; that was part of the contract.

Casey’s great length and the size of his feet and his friendliness and the fact that he was an Irishman would, he felt, appeal to them. All the same—

“Oh glory be to God, but you’re not leavin’ us, doctor dear—Oh what will we do at all——”

Thus Mrs. Driscoll on the first morning of his taking round the new man.

She lived in Taylor’s Alley and owed him a small bill. Three and sixpence; but it was not the three and sixpence speaking in fear of being called up, it was Mrs. Driscoll. Genuine grief.

Mrs. Golightly, of Cassidy’s Rents, was less demonstrative, but she wiped her eye with the corner of her apron. In the event, I think her grief lasted longer than Mrs. Driscoll’s; perhaps English grief lasts longer than Irish grief, though less vocative.

There were a few exceptions. Mr. Blore, the owner of a microscopic shop in Hunter Street, selling paraffin, kindling wood, candles, and such things, was all but rude, seeming to consider Dr. Casey in the light of inferior goods attempted to be palmed off on him. He was a man who boasted that he never owed no man anything and, in fact, lived up to his boast and expected to see others do likewise—not but what he hadn’t to give credit, in fact, half his business was run on credit lines—but limited.

Also there was Mr. Carlton—no connection with the Carlton Club—whose first name was Abraham and whose profession was pawnbroking. His premises were in Lower Endell Street, and he lived, at least made his living, by taking in carpenters’ tools, flat-irons, and such things and lending money on them.

A flat-iron was worth a shilling, all the same Mr. Carlton would lend two shillings on it of a Saturday night if it belonged to a known customer, say Mrs. Summers.

One might imagine Mrs. Summers, having made a hundred per cent. profit on her iron, would have rested on her oars and not returned, leaving it to repose in Abraham’s bosom. But this would be to imagine wrong.

The thing was not an iron but a token of credit. Mrs. Summers could always be sure of turning it into two shillings’ worth of fish and chips on a Saturday night; that she would have to pay a hundred per cent. interest on the loan when she redeemed it on Tuesday morning, or even a week later, did not bother her, for that was only a matter of halfpence.

You may say that this was a wicked profit, extracted from the poor by an unscrupulous pawnbroker; maybe, but all the same Mr. Carlton did a vast deal of good in his immediate neighbourhood, and even if his loans were expended on gin instead of chips and fish, who will say that gin is not a sometime necessity of life in Endell Street.

However, Mr. Carlton, despite his, no doubt, kindly nature, did not greet the news of Flynn’s departure with tears; nor the proposition that he should employ Dr. Casey as a substitute with pleasure.

Casey might have been an old coat with moth in it that Flynn had brought to pawn, for all the evidence of joy in the face of Mr. Carlton. However, the interview, conducted over the counter, passed off without tension and was pleasanter for Flynn than the blank faces of others that day when they heard he was ‘leaving for good’—poor things—poor things.

It was on a Friday morning at eleven o’clock that he left Endell Street for good in a hansom. His heavy luggage had gone on the day before and Biddy had preceded him this morning in a four-wheeler with some forgotten odds and ends and Timotheus the cat in a drug hamper.

Casey came to the surgery door to see him off and a few in-going patients turned their heads to look.

“Where to, sir?” asked the cabby.

“Harley Street,” replied the fare, giving the number.

The way lay along Oxford Street and the morning was bright. That it was Friday did not matter; there was no Irish superstition about changing house on a Friday, it is Saturday that is fatal for that business; Oxford Street was not only sunlit but busy. King Edward the Seventh’s Coronation, though a good while past, had left an effect on the business life of London some evidence of which still remained. The good and jovial King smiled on the city; people had both the inclination and money to spend; the income tax was only a shilling in the pound and low prices, the most cheering thing in the world, helped the inclination.

Beer was only two pence a glass and tobacco four pence an ounce, you could buy a cauliflower for a penny, a dozen of eggs for nine pence, a dozen of oysters for a shilling; a pair of trousers (though not in Savile Row) for half a sovereign, a quite respectable coat and waistcoat for one pound ten. Gold was slapped down on the counters of saloon bars. It was the age of gold if not the Golden Age.

Yes, Oxford Street was cheerful this morning, but its cheeriness was not reflected in the mind of Flynn. He was a bit disturbed and astray.

The city that he knew so well had suddenly turned for him into a city he knew scarcely at all; the people he had known so well were vanished. They were now Casey’s people. The people he did not know were waiting to receive him—or possibly not.

He had left certainty for uncertainty and had, in a way, burned his boats.

Of course if this thing failed it would not mean starvation but it would mean failure, a fall down the ladder and a weary climb again to one of the lower rungs.

He felt chilly, but only for a moment. He was an easy-going man, and all easy-going men are optimists else they wouldn’t go so easily into strange positions, as they sometimes do. The chill began to pass off as the cab left Oxford Street and in Harley Street it had quite vanished.

James opened the door to him, with a smiling face and the information that Mrs. Mahony had arrived and was downstairs in the kitchen.

Mrs. Mahony was Biddy.

He had almost forgotten the fact; for years she had been just Biddy. But Mrs. Mahony had not forgotten it, nor had she forgotten, evidently, to impress the fact on James.

Having glanced into the waiting-room, where no one was waiting and into the consulting-room to see if everything was straight, he came down to the kitchen where Mrs. Mahony was pursuing her activities.

The cat, that had been holding indignation meetings with itself, was still in its hamper unpacked, to give it ‘cooling off time,’ the stove was lit and on it a pot had been put to boil; upon the kitchen table, together with Mrs. Mahony’s bonnet which she had discarded, were some parcels and a string bag containing vegetables. There was milk in a big bottle and, among the parcels, one that evidently contained meat of some sort, probably chops. Flynn, careless man that he was, had never fully recognized the part played by Mrs. Mahony in the conduct of his life and business, or the fact that without her, in this difficult world, he would have been pretty helpless before the great problem set by small affairs.

She had evidently thought everything out; his luncheon for that day and probably his tea and dinner so that he wouldn’t be driven to wasting money going to one of them ‘restayrants.’

“Well, here we are,” said he, looking round him. “Where’s the cat?”

“She’s not unpacked yet,” replied the other, “and won’t be till I have a moment’s time for butterin’ her feet. Howlin’ all the way up Oxford Street she was so’s you could scarce hear the rattlin’ of the cab, but she’s quiet now for I’ve talked to her and promised her some fish; I got a bit of skate for her and it’s there in that paper till I have time to cook it.”

Timotheus, though a full male, but gone in years, was always ‘she’ with Biddy. Flynn, some time a student of the classics, had named the cat, for heaven knows what reason, except its musical qualities when on the tiles; anyhow it was a good enough name when cut down to ‘Tim.’

“And did that young chap bring in your things as I told him?” asked the lady of the kitchen turning some potatoes out of a mat basket and glancing at the kitchen clock already in position, which pointed to twelve.

“You mean James?—yes, he put them in my bedroom and paid off the cab and gave me my latch-key which he’d been keeping for me; he’s all there.”

She reserved her opinion on that matter and said no more, except for the statement that his luncheon would be ready at one o’clock and the warning that he was not to be late for it.

Upstairs he looked into the bedroom where his gladstone bag and small portmanteau were not only there but unstrapped.

James had asked him for the keys of his luggage. Hearing that there were no keys, the ‘all there’ person had evidently taken the statement as an indication of what to do; for the pyjamas, that had formed the top content of the gladstone, were on the bed neatly folded, and the hair-brushes had been taken from their leather case and laid out on the dressing table. It was a pleasant room and, like James, had a smiling face but, like him, it was new to the mind of the gazer and called up recollections of the bedroom that was no longer his.

Here there was no night bell hanging over the bed.

In the times of King Edward the doctor’s night bell had not been replaced by the telephone in London except in the West End and in the highest practices. Even still it may exist in ordinary practices. I don’t know, but it existed in Endell Street where the attenuated telephone system of those days did not extend itself to the commonality.

Flynn noticed the Parsloe telephone by the bed; it formed part of the fixtures; incidentally its rent was due; also he noticed a small bunch of flowers in a little vase on the mantel.

They pleased him; he wondered where Biddy had got them; she was not given to flowers, cabbages were more her line; but the kindly thought gave the room a welcoming touch.

Gracious! the magic of flowers! who has not felt it entering some strange bedroom in some foreign city, if the management has been thoughtful enough to put sixpence worth of them in a vase on the mantelpiece. The city may be full of bearded foreigners, but these are not foreigners but friends.

He looked at his watch and found that it was quarter past twelve; there was time for a stroll before lunch so having straightened his tie in the mirror and picked up his hat, which he had left in the lobby, Dr. Flynn opened his front door and walked into Harley Street.

The day had become even brighter, and the far faint sound of a piano organ came from some adjacent street. Leaving aside a few carriages waiting here and there to pick up, Harley Street seemed pretty empty.

The man who had come to challenge it found little indication of arrogance or opposition; vacuous indifference, if anything, but there were plenty of small well polished door plates, and to offset the varnish of Long Acre on the carriages drawn up here and there, a costermonger’s barrow selling plants in pots was going along, the florist shouting his wares. Quite an ordinary street in some ways. Nothing to indicate drugs, anyway, except a fashionably dressed woman who was coming out of one of the houses where a carriage was drawn up. It was a doctor’s house. He caught a glimpse of her as she sat in the carriage before starting. She was clasping and unclasping her hands, in deep agitation evidently about something. A little farther on he met a beggar, it was a great street for beggars of a certain class, and a little farther on, wanting to get some visiting cards printed at a stationer’s he had been told of, he stopped a tall loosely built man in a frock coat and tall hat striding along and seeming both in a dream and a hurry. He didn’t look as though he was going to a consultation with a doctor, but, anyhow, he had a consultation with a doctor in Harley Street that morning over the nearest way to Welbeck Street about which he seemed as foggy as Flynn. It was Balfour, the new Prime Minister, now in office only a few months and the other did not fully recognize the fact till it was too late to apologize for stopping the government like that. It was also Harley Street where anything may occur except maybe a Punch and Judy Show.

Welbeck Street consented to take the order for the cards and a brass door plate, forgotten till now, and arriving back home ten minutes late for luncheon he found it waiting and Biddy in a disagreeable mood. He told her of his recent political adventure without raising her interest.

“I wonder you’d be talkin’ to that chap after what he done to Ireland,” said she, “with his buckshot and all.”

“That was Foster,” said he, casting his mind back years and taking his seat at the table.

“Well he’s as bad—but what I wanted to be telling you—that young Limb showed an old lady into your waiting-room and there I found her when I came up to lay the plates.”

“You mean James showed an old lady into my waiting-room?”

“That’s him—and there I found her sittin’ in a temper with an ear trumpet, wanting to know how long Dr. Cockshott was going to keep her waiting and I told her I didn’t know any Dr. Cockshott and called James and he let her out and said it must be the ear doctor who was living next door she wanted and I said to him that’s a nice sort of mistake for you to make, and he laughed and from what he let drop I believe he did it a purpose.”

“But why?”

“To get you a patient, that’s why; thinking she was deaf and seeming stupid in her mind and would maybe stick to you once you started doctorin’ her.”

“Well, that was decent of him,” said he, pouring himself out a glass of stout.

“Decent, indeed,” said she, “more like asking a commission on her if he’d nailed her for you—get on with your chop or it’ll be gettin’ cold—I wouldn’t be trusting that young chap too much.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t mean anything, but I couldn’t be trusting him too much. Do you know how old he is?”

“About twenty or twenty-two.”

“He’s over thirty. He told me himself and he’s been in the Langham Hotel, wherever that is, and to America in one of the big ships and I haven’t been going round with one eye shut all these years—not that I’m saying anythin’ against him only I’d be cautious not to be leavin’ money about. He’s too wishin’ to be helpful and doing things.”

Flynn remembered the pyjamas put out and the brushes. The lady of the ear trumpet was making him think. Yes, James was evidently intent on making himself useful; it wasn’t his job to do valeting as well as door opening and if Biddy was right over the Cockshott business James’ morals would seem to be certainly a bit flexible; stealing or making to steal Dr. Cockshott’s patient was on a par with stealing his umbrella or morning milk bottles—but maybe it was all a fancy of Biddy’s. He went on with his lunch and about two o’clock or a little after he went out. He had nowhere to go to, but he went out.

The year of the good King’s coronation had been marked by many events of importance to the nation and the individual. Happy events most of them; if we exclude the death of Rhodes, which occurred in March, and a few minor social tragedies. The Boer War had ended on 31 May, Ireland was quiet, the world in general was at peace; Curzon was Viceroy of India, and Kipling had just published Kim.

Lady Londonderry was entertaining in Londonderry House and Lady St. Helier was giving her luncheon parties in Portland Place. Hall Caine had just published The Eternal City, Marie Corelli had just published The Master Christian and was up to her eyes in God’s Good Man; many others beside this brace of immortals were here in the race for fame including Bernard Shaw, who had just published Three Plays for Puritans and whose Man and Superman was in the writing. The mother of Bootle’s Baby was reproducing after her kind. Thomas Frederick Tout had just produced Germany and the Empire. There were small poets growing round the Bodley Head and being carefully watered by John Lane; Watson—the one who damned Abdul—had just published the ‘Coronation Ode,’ and Le Gallienne was drowsing in the golden sunshine after the publication of his Sleeping Beauty.

Men were starving in Whitechapel, of course, but that did not diminish the appetites of Romanos and the Café Royal and, anyhow, we have nothing to do with Whitechapel for the moment but with the West End, that sunlit two square miles of country where Dr. Flynn had arrived, if not to conquer, at least to scratch his living from, and through which he was now wending his way devious but in a direction tending towards the Park.

It was a beautiful day. Those who can remember will remember the lovely weather of the late autumn of 1902, an Indian summer—with no suggestion of wigwams about it—whose sunlight was now lighting the Marble Arch as Dr. Flynn made the crossing and came along past the flower-beds and with the railings and great houses of Park Lane to the left of him; great houses and a few smaller ones, but all an exhibition of contained and quiet splendour.

There were children in the park, and nursemaids, to say nothing of the chrysanthemums that had taken the place of summer flowers and a guardsman or two and a policeman who seemed moving about in his sleep, a general atmosphere of day-dreaming, if not slumber, that passed away on his reaching Rotten Row.

The lovely weather had brought out the carriages as sun brings out butterflies, not so many as in the season, but enough to tell their tale of Long Acre, and Mullins, Lincoln, and Bennett were well represented in the tall hats of the loungers by the rails and Worth by the costumes of his customers. It was all most interesting. Flynn took a chair near the rails, for which he was charged twopence; he would have lit the pipe he had with him only for a sort of feeling that if he did he would probably be ejected; and possibly he would.

Yes, it was all very interesting. There were dowagers in those days, and you could see them driving in barouches and their daughters lolling beside them, the carriage attitude to be learned as a part of deportment. There was a legend of that time that Sam X, the money-lender, who had spent a thousand guineas on a carriage and pair for his two daughters, went on horseback to the Park to see how they looked in their new setting and, incensed with what he saw, came cantering alongside them with the order, “Loll, you b——s, loll,” whereupon they lolled. Yes, there were lolling girls here to-day and also girls on horseback and cavaliers on horseback and loungers by the rails attired by Poole and loungers attending to the conversational wants of lovely girls; the whole moving scene a picture after the heart of Tissot.

Flynn sat a good while contemplating his future patients in bulk, without seeing a sample he could take away in the pocket of his imagination, except, maybe, one gouty looking old gentleman whose system seemed absolutely shouting to heaven for colchicum and a cut off from good living.

It was not the elegance of the crowd but its disgusting appearance of good health and vitality that might have depressed a prospecting medical mind of the general practitioner type, but it did not depress the mind of Dr. Flynn.

His was not a mind to be depressed by obstacles, and he rarely saw them before he was on to them.

Presently, and in a little while, he found himself outside the gates with the choice of Knightsbridge on the right, Piccadilly on the left, and Victoria straight in front of him.

He chose Piccadilly. At Piccadilly Circus a good many choices were offered him; he chose the Strand.

Here he was coming into his own country, or at least, close to it.

The Strand, whatever else it may be, and with due respect to Mr. Max Beerbohm, is a warm street. To-day, in this first year of King Edward’s reign, it was perhaps a bit warmer than it is to-day in the year in which you are reading this; but it was certainly not colder than in the early days of the Great Queen and of the Gas, Light and Coke Company.

“When the Strand was Gas Lit.” What a title for a novel! as it might be for this, were it not for the fact that, like Flynn, I have chosen Harley Street.

He kept along on the left-hand side of it (the Strand) till he reached Mooneys and went in. Mooneys was, and I expect still is, an Irish congregating point where the accent of County Dublin and the accent of County Cork met, without mingling, at a bar where the best whisky in London was sold, needless to say, John Jameson’s.

This afternoon, standing at the bar, was a fine figure of a man, portly, red faced, well dressed in a frock coat and tall hat, with the hat tilted a bit back from his forehead; the left hand in his trousers pocket jingling sovereigns. This was Dr. John Hennessy, no less, and some people may remember him.

Dr. John Hennessy, of Bayswater.

He had come down to see a patient in the Strand, for his practice was as wide as that, and his private hansom was anchored outside Mooneys, where he had dropped in to have a look round, also a whisky and soda.

“Why, if it isn’t Flynn!” cried Hennessy. They were both Trinity men and good friends, but of recent years they had rarely met, once at the Irish Literary Society and once somewhere else but not in practice, for the hansom of Hennessy might take him to a patient in the Strand but never a patient in Endell Street. He knew in a vague sort of way that the other was doing a slum practice somewhere round about Drury Lane, but that was all.

“And where,” asked he, after they had turned over Trinity, Mahaffy, old days, and the doings of Parnell, “are you hanging out now?”

“Harley Street,” said Flynn.

“Ah, get out with you!”

“It’s true, all the same.”

“Practising there?”

“Yes.”

“Have you many patients, may I ask?”

“One old lady who blew in by mistake.”

“And how long have you been there?”

“Oh, about twenty-four hours, or maybe less.”

Then, in a few words, he gave a précis of his doings; the other greatly wondering, but not without a certain admiration.

“Well, to be sure! honest to goodness, I thought you were codding me, and you’ve only moved in to-day so you won’t be busy with work; come along up to my place and stay and have a bit of dinner. I’ve got me hansom at the door and I’ll whisk you up there. It’s Inverness Terrace, Hyde Park. It’s Bayswater really, but it’s got one foot in Hyde Park, as you may say, and sounds better.”

Flynn gladly enough accepted the invitation, refused another whisky, and got into the cab at the door.

Hennessy had been practising some twelve years in London and all the time in Inverness Terrace. He had bought old Dr. Mullins’ practice. Old Dr. Mullins was practising at the smaller end of the terrace, which might be compared to a carrot. Big houses at the Kensington Gardens end and diminishing in size towards the end opening on Westbourne Terrace Road.

Hennessy spent three years in the house of old Dr. Mullins then he moved to a larger house in the middle, and then after five years to his present abode, taking all his household goods and gods with him including old Dr. Mullins.

You see, the old gentleman had so messed and muddled his affairs and had so failed in his attempts to right them with the help of whisky, that six months after parting with his practice he was on the rocks, or more strictly speaking, in the bar of the Royal Oak public-house, within a biscuit toss of Inverness Terrace, and in such a condition that Hennessy was sent running for as the nearest doctor.

Dr. Mullins was destitute as well as drunk. Hennessy took him home and put him into a bedroom also into a bed, and that was the beginning of things. There was no Mrs. Hennessy to turn him out. He was a dear old thing, anyhow, and had capsized mostly owing to his unbalanced good qualities, and as he cost next to nothing to keep he was more in the nature of a stray dog picked up in the street than a stray doctor. Something to look after, anyhow.

Something to look after! What have the philosophers been doing who have failed to list that necessity amongst, or at all events closely after, the necessities of food, fuel, clothes, and housing? Ask old Mrs. Jones’ canary bird—ask Mrs. Thompson’s husband—ask yourself.

Anyhow and apart from this, Hennessy couldn’t turn him out—how could he? And he seemed to bring luck.

Flynn was greatly struck by the size of the house of Hennessy, no less than by its atmosphere of warmth and well-being when they were inside.

It had nothing about it of business unless, perhaps, the business of a city merchant; certainly nothing about it of the business of a doctor. In fact, in this year of our Lord it was the only doctor’s house at this end of the carrot, though there were two at the thin end and one in the middle. The rooms were lofty.

Hennessy, who had let himself in with a latch-key, having glanced at some messages on the hall table, threw open the dining-room door. This also was the waiting-room in the hearty Dublin fashion copied by a good many English practitioners, and behind it lay the consulting-room, behind that a hole of a room containing drugs, for he sometimes made up his own prescriptions, though rarely.

He showed all this, talking all the time, and then led the way upstairs, talking all the time.

“I want to show you old Mullins I was telling you about,” said he, “you can sit and have a clack with him while I run round to see a patient in Lancaster Gate, dinner’s not till seven and I won’t be long gone.”

Dr. Mullins was seated in an arm-chair in a dressing-gown, over a nice little fire in a back room that was evidently his bedroom to judge by the camp bed in one corner, though there was no wash-hand stand—anyhow, he didn’t seem to bother much about washing; all the same he was a nice kindly-looking old thing with a white beard to save him the bother of shaving, and he was cutting something out of a newspaper with a large pair of scissors.

There were piles and piles of old newspapers by the door, and his business in life these days was making cuttings to be pasted in a book. There was no book visible, no paste pot, and the cuttings would be collected by Maria, the maid, next day and taken off below stairs to read (maybe), if she were interested in such subjects as Mr. Balfour’s last speech, leading articles, or the Balkan position, last month’s weather reports, or Professor Stuffworth’s letter to The Times, or the “Romanization of Chinese Place Names.”

Anyhow, the scissors and the press cuttings were a godsend to Dr. Hennessy, representing you might think, a toy given to a child to keep it quiet or to a lunatic.

But you would be partly wrong. The old gentleman was neither a child nor a lunatic, exactly speaking, though sometimes seeming to sit in the sunshine of happy Illusion as now when Hennessy went off, giving the reason before stated and leaving him alone with Flynn.

“Won’t you sit down,” said Dr. Mullins, putting the scissors aside. “It is a bit chilly, though seasonable for the time of year; you are one of our profession—and what hospital, may I ask?”

“I’m a Dublin man—Trinity College.”

“Ah! Dublin. Do you happen to know a gentleman named Maloney, of Dublin?”

“No.”

“He was my assistant in the year 1879 and he left me under somewhat unhappy circumstances; monetary circumstances. Owing to bills unpaid and other things. If you ever meet Dr. Maloney you might stir his mind about this business.”

Flynn agreed to act in this manner and the old gentleman went on to talk of the present practice and the reliability and general excellence of Dr. Hennessy, and it came to the other in a weird sort of way that Dr. Mullins was talking as though he were boss of the present practice and Hennessy the assistant.

Reliability! with Hennessy’s heart nearly jumping out of him every time the servant came to him saying: “I can’t find Dr. Mullins in his room, sir, I hope he ain’t gone out.”

Visions of him being run over in his dressing-gown by omnibuses or lost and having to be hunted for; visions, however, belonging to the past, for recently the creator of them was so gone in his legs that he couldn’t do the stairs alone—tethered like a goat, you may say.

Having exhausted the present practice, Dr. Mullins went on to talk of William Whiteley and the time when green trees were growing in Westbourne Grove. “But that was some years ago,” said he. Then he stopped talking. He had fallen asleep and the visitor had to sit quiet as a sick nurse for fear of waking him, and so Hennessy found him on his return.

It was a pleasant dinner. The Irish are either the best servants in the world or the worst. Hennessy’s lot were the best, and Mrs. Burke, in the kitchen, tipped that an Irish friend of her master’s was coming to dinner, had risen on the shoulders of the occasion; at all events in the hare soup.

The Scotch have a name for sticking together, but I wonder if the Scotch stick together in England after the fashion of the Irish, or do they leave their stickiness behind them when they drop their kilts on the Border?

I don’t know. I can only speak for the Irish through the fact that Flynn, after this pleasant dinner and over a fairly decent glass of port, told his host all about Pat and how he had stolen him by accident, as you may say, and planted him on a woman who was “eating her heart out for want of a dog.”

“And why, in God’s name, didn’t you go and buy her a dog?” said Hennessy, a bit confused in his mind as regards the subtleties of the story, “taking all that trouble and landing yourself who knows where—and the woman he belongs to, won’t she be eating her heart out for want of the child?”

“Faith, I don’t know,” said the other, “the last time I saw her she was drinking gin and the place was like a rabbit warren with children. I couldn’t put him back there and that’s the truth. And who are you, to be talking? Look at yourself and old Mullins, you might have stuck him into the workhouse—but you didn’t.”

“Well, maybe I might, but he hadn’t a mother, gin or no gin, you can’t get over that. Now tell me, the woman you planted him with, didn’t you tell me she was a nervous type of creature? That’s near as bad as gin; oh, she may be all right, but leaving that aside, you can’t make a mother out of a woman by planting a child on her to look after—or, maybe, you can; it’s not for me to be laying down the law and, anyhow, what are we but a pair of old bachelors talking through our hats about children? Pass me the port—now tell me about this new practice of yours. I don’t see from what you tell me that you shouldn’t make good all right. Look at Donovan; he’d been muddling about in Kentish Town, when his old grandmother died and left him some money, and he came up and planted himself in Wimpole Street. It took him a bit of time, and with rent and all he told me he was reduced to living on winkles and biscuits and cheese at the Bodega in Glass House Street when he got hold of a good patient and then he never looked back. A doctor that gets hold of a good patient in the West End spreads like a disease. They infect each other.”

Flynn went off about half-past ten fortified by the good cheer and optimism of his host and carrying with him some bits of practical advice, such as: “Get money on the nail if you can; if you let them run bills send in your bills quarterly and make them pay, even if you have to county court them. There are chaps practising up here that won’t do that for fear of losing them—and a good loss, too; and there are some that think if you county court them they’ll go round and tell the others, tcha! no man has ever boasted of being dragged into the county court. A Jew family is as good as a gold mine to you, but they’ll likely plague you to death with their nerves and imaginations, and, by the way, never county court a Jew; he mayn’t talk, but the others will smell it.”

Sage advice, as of a man instructing another man how to cook geese, before they are caught. However, Hennessy had given the other something better than advice, a dose of warmth and cheerfulness; and I am not so sure that the picture of Dr. Mullins did not contribute like an old stick added to the fire of his protector’s geniality.

The moon was shining on Harley Street when the cab drew up and its occupant got out, taking his latch-key from his pocket.

Part Two

You can never know a house unless you have slept in it.

A house has two spirits, its day spirit and its night spirit.

Old country houses dream and creak in their dreams and snore through their chimneys when the wind is from the west—or is it the north, and make other noises never heard by day.

Town houses are the same, only the noises are generally from without.

Endell Street night noises are different from those of Harley Street, a fact noted by Flynn as he lay in bed that night reading a book before switching off the light.

Nothing here to note the closing of public houses, the existence of mouth-organs or marital disputes; nothing here but the occasional bells of a passing hansom and now and then the far away grumble of the last omnibus traffic from distant streets.

With the light switched off, these inconsiderable sounds grew more remote leaving the darkness to talk to Dr. Flynn, and it said to him, quietly yet quite decisively: “Well, you’ve done it.”

Meaning to say, that he had done it, cut himself off from his old connections and ways of life and embarked, so to say, on a raft, on a partly unknown sea; he and Biddy and Timotheus the cat, to say nothing of the fleas that might form the personal belonging of the latter.

A man is never so helpless as when he is in his pyjamas.

Up and dressed and with his shoes on Dr. Flynn was able to face the world and its problems, and indeed, it sometimes seems to consist of nothing else; but, dressed as he was, it was different—also, he was lying down, a position which, restful enough for the body, is not restful for the mind or conducive to peace.

Patrick Brontë elected to die standing up, maybe so that his tormented body should have its say in the business as a counter to a place filled with old unpleasant memories to say nothing of the mumblings of conscience. But Flynn was not dying, just making to get to sleep and his conscience did not trouble him at all—only his bank balance. That was satisfactory enough, the bother was the things it had to balance in the other pan of the scales with no assured income to help in the weighing. There was also something else. Never before had he been called upon to fight the world. The Endell Street practice and the partnership before that, had needed no fighting to obtain and keep. The patients were there, ready made, and though the pay was poor enough it was certain.

Here it was different. Very different. However, disturbing as it might be to absolute peace of mind, the position had its bright sides—if you could call them bright. He had no wife and children depending upon him and if he failed he would have resources of sorts to help him get into another grubby practice somewhere, even though he would always have the taste of Harley Street in his mouth and the knowledge that he had failed.

Perhaps the happiest minded man in the world is the farmhand whose ambition it is to plough a straight furrow, feed pigs, stack corn and keep on doing it till the end of his life. He may meet with disaster, but not failure, a very different thing.

There was something else other than vague considerations of this sort that kept sleep from the lids of Flynn—Timotheus was not at the foot of the bed. The cat always slept on his bed, coming up about ten o’clock and settling himself comfortably on the old travelling rug at the bed foot. He wasn’t there to-night, hadn’t got into the habit yet in this strange place, or maybe Biddy had kept him downstairs on purpose. Thinking of this, Flynn suddenly found himself in the Park, still in his pyjamas and wheeling old Dr. Mullins in a bath chair. Hennessy had said something about having to get him a bath chair. That was enough for the dream artist who sits in every man’s brain all day making sketches and throwing them over his shoulder to the devil who does the picture producing at night.

Then the thing turned into a perambulator with Pat in it. Then suddenly he had lost Pat and was hunting for him in Mooney’s bar.

He was awakened at seven by Biddy bringing him a cup of tea and the news that Timotheus hadn’t settled down properly yet. “It’s the ould scullery he’s missing,” said she. “There was a rat-hole under the sink he’d sit by for the hour listenin’ to their doings, to say nothing of the back door where the neighbours’ cats would be looking in for him. Butter his feet? Sure I have, and he licks it off, and then it’s up and down and up and down the place like a policeman he is. I showed him the backyard and he took a sniff at it and come in. I didn’t tell you, sir, but Margaret looked in on me last evening when you were out.”

Biddy was not saying all this by the bed where her master was sitting up drinking his tea, she was at the door, with one hand on the door handle. These postscript door-handle conversations were often longer and more important than the matter that went before.

“Oh, she did, did she?” said he.

“Yes, sir, she come to see how we’d settled in, and I told her I couldn’t be telling her, since I’d scarce set down in the house let alone slept in it, and she had a cup of tay and told me all about Pat and how he’d kep’ them awake the night before last with a bellowin’ fit, though he’d been as good as gold up to then, and I said it was maybe a tooth coming, and I’d tell you and maybe you’d look in and see him.”

“Yes, I’ll go and have a look at him—how’s that stove getting on?”

Biddy laughed.

The kitchen stove had been the only debatable point with her as far as the fixtures went. It was the very latest thing in gas stoves with an oven and all, challenging, like a knight in shining armour, the old black Endell Street coal and coke stove to which she was used.

Labour saving, trouble saving, fuel saving and costing Parsloe over twenty pounds, it was, all the same, not taken to in a kindly spirit, if not exactly resented.

“Getting on,” said she. “Faith it’s been getting on with its tricks; roarin’ like a hurricane if you turn one of the taps a bit too much to the left and going out like a snuff on you if you turns it too much to the right—all taps and directions—only James happened to come down before he went off for the night to see if he could do anything (it was a cup of tay he wanted; trust that lad to be looking out for himself) and put it to rights for me.”

“Well, that was decent of him, anyway,” said Flynn, and Biddy went off with a sniff, leaving him to get up and dress.

Like Kipling’s signalman waking up for ‘another day of perishing five flag hoists’ Dr. Casey in Endell Street would be waking, just now, to another day of perishing dispensary work and all that it implies. Well, he would be busy anyhow. He wouldn’t have to sit waiting for patients.

The worlds that constitute London are populated largely by waiters—especially the medical and legal worlds.

Mr. Justice Hawkins took up his abode on the fifth floor of 3 Elm Court, and there he sat, as stated by himself, month in and month out waiting for attorneys’ clerks to bring him briefs; he heard them knocking at all the other floors but never at the fifth—till, one day, one did. Hawkins was in. But he wouldn’t have been in if he hadn’t waited.

Flynn’s position was a bit less trying than that of Hawkins. He hadn’t to sit so tight to his chair on the chance of a sudden call. Accidents are rare in Harley Street itself and broken legs from a distance won’t come running as a rule for help to a street populated by nose doctors, throat doctors, eye doctors, heart doctors, ear doctors, to say nothing of neuro-pathological doctors, and where the house of a general practitioner doctor is as rare, almost, as a cowslip in March.

No, unlike the lawyer man, he could get out and about a bit without the likelihood of missing some bright chance, especially as the door was in the guardianship of James.

Whatever James might be in the opinion of Biddy or Doctor Cherry he had proved himself as a receptionist who, anyhow, wouldn’t drive patients away if they called.

So Flynn, having breakfasted and smoked a pipe and read the paper and looked into his bank book, finding it a hundred pounds better than he thought, put on his hat and came out into the blessed sunshine and freedom of the street. He had always kept his bank balance mostly in his mind and rightly enough, for he was a practical man in most matters and when he wasn’t stealing slum children to put them into the homes of the aristocracy; but this hundred pounds paid into his account by O’Geoghan, the Dublin solicitor, as the last money on the sale of a bit of land that had been left to him (Flynn) by an old aunt who had died in Mayo, had eluded him.

It was like money found and so heartened him that he gave a shilling to an old lady selling boot-laces in Welbeck Street and received her blessing, which was also to the good.

Then he proceeded to see a patient; Pat, no less, walking all the way to Cunningham Mansions, time being of little consequence.

Margaret let him into the flat.

Julia Corkran was out.

“He’s been at it again last night,” said Margaret. “From twelve to one; good as gold till twelve and then he let out. No, sir, he’s not in my room, he’s in the beyont room. I put him there to save her from his noise.”

The ‘beyont’ room was the spare bedroom beyond Margaret’s room and there the visitor found Mr. Ginnis in his bassinette seemingly in the best of health and without any sign of a hangover from the night’s work.

“Twelve to one,” said Flynn, gazing at the object in question. “Well, you only had an hour of it.”

“Oh, it’s not me that minded,” said Margaret, “but if she’s put off her sleep—well, there you are. Anyhow, he’s all right here; he might shout himself black and it wouldn’t reach her room with my room between us and the curtains I’m puttin’ up inside my door.”

“It was the same at Collington Gardens before we came here to live; only it was cats there,” went on Margaret.

“Here’s a prescription for a grey powder,” said Flynn, taking a note-book from his pocket and tearing out a leaf. “Send it round to Carter’s in Wigmore Street—or better still I’ll leave it there myself as I go by and tell him to send it—it’ll save you the trouble—and when do you think she’ll be back?”

“Faith, I don’t know,” said Margaret, “she may be in any moment or she may be out to lunch like she was yesterday. It’s put her regularly on the wander.”

“Well, anyhow it’s got her off that confounded couch and into the air. As I told you before when she began to stir about and go out buying things it’ll be the making of her.”

“Well, I wish it wouldn’t make her so short in the temper,” said Margaret, “but, sure, how can she help it? It’s the Corkran temper—same as being born with a squint.”

“Well, she’ll just have to put a cork in it,” said he, “squint or no squint. You can’t go through life with a temper in your pocket ready to fly out on you for next to nothing at all. Look at me and the trouble I’ve had over the business.”

“And there you’ve put your foot in it,” said Margaret. “It’s not the trouble that worries her so much as the business to be looked after. Good business or bad, it’s all the same. Only the day before yesterday she had a letter from Miss Hancock to say old Mr. Shane of Kinsella Park down in Mayo was dropped dead and he’d willed his money to them——”

“Who’s them?”

“She and Miss Hancock, cousins they were to him, and a big lump of money by all accounts; but faith it might have been a tax paper she’d got instead of the news of half a fortune be all the pleasure she got out of it. More money, more trouble, was what she seemed to be thinking. It’s just she’s got set in her ways like a wheel goin’ round and only wantin’ to go easy and not have grits get in it.”

He stood for a moment contemplating the pattern of the floor carpet as if considering the problem in mechanics just presented to him.

Then he said, testily enough:

“It’s a pity some people haven’t a little more real trouble in this world; when I think of the women I’ve known, hanging on to the wash-tub with one hand, with, maybe, a drunken husband beating them and the landlord knocking at the door for his rent and keeping cheerful—well, there you are—and I’ll look in in a day or two and I’ll tell Carter’s to send you up the powder.” Off he went. The Flynns had a family temper as well as the Corkrans and it may have been that if he had met Julia in the street just now the two tempers would have clashed to the benefit of their possessors.

However that may have been, the interview with Margaret had disturbed him a bit in his self-assurance and seeming belief, that a doctor, or any other man, can go messing about with the ways of Providence, especially in so far as those ways have to do with social affairs and the multiplex relationships of London life.

The Ginnis household might be this or that, but it would be hard to imagine Mrs. Ginnis breaking down over her washing because she had been disturbed in her sleep by one of her brats.

Nature breeds toughness, not where it is wanted but where it is necessary. Julia might want toughness but it wasn’t necessary to her. Toughness was necessary to Mrs. Ginnis so she had it whether she wanted it or not—in other words she had it.

She would doubtless be a more desirable mother without gin, worry, husband and dirt disabilities; on the other hand would she have been improved as a mother if these had been replaced by nerves, cleanliness, virginity, and the absence of care?

I don’t know. But Flynn felt a bit disturbed in his mind with Pat for the centre of oscillation and the knowledge that if anyone was at fault it wasn’t Julia but himself. He was the cook who had made the stew—an Irish stew if ever there was one—which Julia would have to eat.

The human mind is so constituted that a cloud covering the sky is sometimes less disturbing than a cloud the size of a man’s hand on the horizon.

However, Flynn had his own plateful of stew to eat in the form or the practice and all it might imply, and Julia with the help of her aunt if not the cooks had been helpers in the stirring of it; so, if it came to clouds developing in the way of possibilities he might call things quit—maybe.

Maybe is a lovely word.

Stopping at the chemist’s in Wigmore Street where he was known, having called there once before about some special medicine for Julia, he gave in the prescription for the grey powder and then went on home, letting himself in with his latch-key and coming face to face with a man who was in the act of letting himself out.

A youngish man, middle-sized, with a carefully trimmed black beard, the blue eyes of a child, and a cheerful manner of countenance. Also one might fancy a quick thinker, for seeing the latch-key in the hand of the other he said, “Pardon me, but are you the new man who has taken the lower rooms?”

“Yes,” said Flynn.

“Thought you must be. I’m Cherry on the next floor, Dr. Andrew Cherry. I’d have called on you anyhow—and how do you like the rooms?”

“Oh, they aren’t bad,” said Flynn attracted by the manner and appearance of the other one: “Come along in and look at them.”

Dr. Andrew Cherry seemed nothing loth. He followed the other into the waiting-room and put his silk hat on the table and looked around him and made appreciative comments on the fittings and furniture, and even on the absence of furniture: “No pictures,” said he. “You are right—patients don’t want pictures. Would you believe it, old Parsloe had the ‘Day of Judgment’ hanging up and the ‘Plains of Heaven’ on the wall opposite; not that it mattered much, for he was a skin man and I expect his patients had enough to do scratching themselves not to bother. Cheerful pictures! There aren’t any such things in a waiting-room. A cheerful doctor is a different thing. I ought to know. I’m mental—what are you? General practice!—well it’s the same thing, hand out cheerfulness; better than any drug in the God-damn pharmacopoeia—Yes, I’m mental; depressing work. Not a bit, keeps you laughing all the time. Laughing all the time, think it did. Just now when I was running out and you met me I was off to see an old chap—he’s a Duke by the way—got everything he wants including a grouse moor which hasn’t been any use to him this season as he’s been expecting to have a baby.”

“Expecting to have a baby?”

“That’s what he says, but I think he’s wrong, not at his age. I know Sarah was seventy but he’s eight-three. Anyhow there he is and there he’s been all the summer, not able to go to the Coronation for fear of a miscarriage and with two nurses from Lowood, one acting as monthly, the other as the other thing. There’s nothing like humouring people like him, specially when they’re dukes. I was medical superintendent at Lowood before I started for myself and that was their plan, sympathy and kindness—humouring them. There’s a story at Lowood of a visiting medical by name of Briggs on his back with a chap just going to cut his head off with a hatchet and the Superintendent shouting, ‘Humour him, Dr. Briggs, humour him.’ Well, I must be humouring myself off—come up to my rooms and have a smoke to-night, any time after nine and tell me all about yourself—you said you were a G.P. I suppose a lot of your patients will be backing you here.”

“Not they,” said Flynn, “I’ve been running a cash practice in Endell Street.”

Dr. Cherry swallowed at this, laughingly as though he were swallowing a joke:

“Well,” he said, “I must be running off to my midwifery case—drop up to-night anyhow—ting-tong,” and off he went to the relief of Biddy who was waiting in the hall by the room where he dined with a dish-cover, so to speak, in her hand and the knowledge in her head that the curry over the kitchen stove was being over-cooked.

It was ten minutes past one.

There had been no callers. “Only a chap sellin’ microscopes,” said she. “That limb James came down to me when I was peelin’ the onions sayin’ there was a man at the door with a long coat and a red nose sellin’ microscopes and did I think you’d want any, and I said, ‘Get out of me kitchen,’ I said, ‘with your talk, you and your microscopes. You mane them brass things you look through with one eye shut—well, he’s got one—you didn’t let him into the conshultin’-room did you, to be stalin’ the things?’ ‘No,’ said he, ‘I shunted him off and shut the dure on him.’ ‘Then in the name of God,’ I says, ‘what do you come down here botherin’ me for, I know what you’re after, it’s your elevenses you want; there’s the lay pot on the stove and you can fill yourself a cup, same as you did yesterday, and go aisy on the sugar for I’m short.’ Microscopes!”

Off she went.

There was one thing to be said for James, anyhow, he was something to think about. The same might be said of Dr. Hennessy and old Mullins and Pat in his bassinette and Timotheus the cat and Biddy and Dr. Andrew Cherry.

I doubt if Flynn could have existed much beyond this second day of his in Harley Street without these living and human aids to existence.

Think of yourself as a sailor, landed from the busy, if grubby, life of the forecastle on the beach of Kerguelin island, sitting down to make your mental living, if not your bodily, in the highly correct company of the white-shirted black tail-coated penguins.

Think of yourself as a doctor landed from this busy, if grubby, life of Endell Street to make your bodily as well as mental living on the beach of white-shirted black tail-coated fashionable London.

Think of it in detail. After breakfast, sit and wait and read the paper. After lunch; how about a walk in the park and a look at the penguins? After tea what? After dinner how about a look in at a penguin theatre?

No, this sort of thing had never been envisaged either by himself, or Julia Corkran, or Jane Hancock, or the Gordons or the other God knows whats, who had said to him, ‘Come West,’ urged him to ‘strike out’ and then put him between two feather beds to smother—same as they used to do with hydrophobia patients in Ireland long ago.

But the people who had come into his new environment had saved him, at least from smotheration during the first period of experience, and there were doubtless more to come along. Dr. Andrew Cherry seemed a bright sample of possibilities.

So it came about that having finished his luncheon and taken another glance at the papers and smoked a pipe Dr. Flynn put on his hat, took his walking stick and went out, telling James that if anyone called he had gone to see the Duchess of Winchester.

He had already, in a light-hearted Irish way admitted James, not to terms of intimacy but to terms of one-sided persiflage as of one speaking from a top window to another in the street. If James had received the message otherwise than as a jest from above or had attempted any back persiflage he would have been promptly trounced and eaten—and he knew it.

The physician to the Duchess of Winchester did not find Her Grace in Westbourne Grove, when he arrived about an hour later having traversed the journey on foot taking in Cavendish Square, (where he noticed Parsloe’s newly put-up plate) the delights of the Edgware Road and Praed Street, the solidified light-hearted loveliness of the great houses fronting the approach to Paddington Station, and the station itself.

He did not find the Duchess, but he found what he was looking for in Westbourne Grove; the establishment of William Whiteley.

Hennessy had recommended Whiteleys as the best and cheapest shop in London, and wanting a new necktie (‘that ould necktie is a disgrace to you’ had said Biddy only that morning) he went there.

Mr. Whiteley was much more than a shop man; he was part and parcel of the British Empire with its growing spirit, and he had marked the opening of the Edwardian era with a continuance of his sprawl, not towards Africa and the East but right into Queens Road.

Clever man that he was, he had not deserted the little old shops in Westbourne Grove that had brought him luck, and it was in one of these, the Gent’s Shirt and Hosiery Department, that Dr. Flynn bought his necktie.

All that journey to buy a necktie! you will say, not knowing a fact unrecognized by the Corkran brigade who had urged him to come up West and dash about in a carriage—the fact that a cash practice doctor puts in most of his time walking.

With patients ranging from one-and-six to two shillings a visit, it saves him money, also it keeps him sane; anyhow, in health.

Undoubtedly the turning day of the world dawned when the fish were ordered to get out of the water and walk, and getting out of their gondolas and finding no horses or taxi cabs had to hoof it on their long, long track towards the glories of civilization. When the coal measures and oil wells are exhausted one may imagine people will have to take to their feet again on the track towards a civilization less glorious, maybe, but one may hope more sane.

All of which means to imply that there is nothing like walking to keep you in health if not in wealth.

Anyhow, on the second day of his new life it kept our man in cheerfulness—which is the same thing, a cheerfulness scarcely dimmed as he sat down to dinner, by Biddy’s announcement that Timotheus hadn’t taken yet to his new home, and that she didn’t like the way of him; all the same, at half-past eight and before paying his call upon Dr. Cherry, he dropped down to the kitchen to have a look at the cat.

T. was lying in a basket close to the stove with an old woolly shawl of Biddy’s under him. He looked drowsy, but there didn’t seem anything much wrong with him, what had disturbed her was the fact that his saucer with a nice piece of cod chopped up in it was neglected.

Fish was more than food to him; it was a passion, almost a religion, and she had put on her bonnet and darted out that morning to Dukes the fish shop in Wigmore Street (recommended by James) to get it. Nice fresh cod fit for a king she had told him without raising any interest.

She said it was the kitchen that had got him, and maybe she was right, for, despite its up-to-dateness, it had few amenities. No rat-hole fitted with ancient and modern smells and sounds indicative of life below stairs; no scullery window—he would spend hours at the Endell Street scullery window watching the sparrows and their doings; no old cupboards filled with odds and ends and mice indications—and it wasn’t as if he were young and adaptable. He was not young when his master picked him up in the street.

Flynn, having examined this his first patient in Harley Street, gave a favourable prognosis and prescribed warm milk with two drops of brandy in it. (Sick animals love brandy.) Then he went up to visit Dr. Cherry.

Cherry had been in practice here for over a year and he seemed flourishing, to judge from his rooms as well as himself.

Of course his connection with Lowood had given him a pull and also his little book on paranoia that the Lancet had reviewed so favourably, though Dr. Glumb in the B.M.J. hadn’t been quite so enthusiastic. Anyhow, despite Dr. Glumb, who had earned the nickname Gloom, and his newness in the business, the cheerful Cherry was undoubtedly prospering.

Nothing pays like lunacy in the medical world (as, seemingly, in the political). One old gentleman like the before-mentioned expectant Duke expecting a baby is worth a dozen expectant Duchesses and all the trouble they would involve. Also the pay is sure. There are few bad debts in a business where secrecy is the essence of most contracts.

“Come in with you,” said Cherry, who had been expecting his visitor, “and cock yourself in that arm-chair. I’ll be with you in one moment.”

He went out about something and the visitor took the arm-chair and looked round him at the pleasant room where, as a rule, patients or rather (as a rule) the friends and relatives of patients were asked to wait, till the doctor could see them.

“Always make them wait,” was a rule in the theory and practice of this practitioner’s business, whether he was in or out or busy or idle; and a very good rule too in life.

R. D. Blumenfeld, in his delightful Diary, tells of the perturbation of a fashionable London tailor on being asked to send in a bill that was only three months due.

He had been used to waiting a year or more, and this extraordinary behaviour might mean that his client had gone unfashionable and was going to marry beneath him, or else going to change his tailor—so, perhaps, he argued.

Anyhow, in fashionable London it was not the thing to do. No more than for a fashionable diner to arrive on the stroke of eight or a fashionable physician to exhibit himself as something on tap and not as a rare wine bottled.

To come back to Cherry, this room, for people in waiting would be a most pleasant room; no ‘Days of Judgment’ or ‘Plains of Heaven’ on the walls; no comic papers to make grimaces in the face of Tragedy.

“You didn’t see a young fellow going down as you were coming up?” asked the host, producing whisky and soda, and lighting his pipe. “Used to be a patient of mine, but drops in sometimes to see me as a friend. The young Earl of Newmarket (let’s call him), you’d never dream there was anything wrong with him now; and there isn’t, only an idea left over in his mind that he’s got the head of a horse.”

“Well,” said Flynn, who was always direct, “seems to me you didn’t make much of a cure of him.”

Cherry laughed.

“You should have seen him at first; used to get into bed with his boots and spurs on; took to housekeeping and used to order in sacks of oats for his unfortunate wife; of course it was the drink that set him off like that. Now he’s religious, since I got him down to barley water. There’s a lot of religion in barley water.”

“Well, I’ve never had cases like that,” said Flynn, “they don’t happen down our way—at least they didn’t. Is it just because people are rich, or what?”

“Oh, Lord, no—just because they have nothing to do—that and class bleeding which is as bad as in-breeding—you see, a class that hasn’t had to scrape for its living for centuries gets super-sensitive and that’s where old man Lunacy sometimes creeps in, or his wife, old woman Nerves; she attends to the woman side of the show, and I declare to God I don’t know which is worse, a chap that fancies himself a horse or a neurotic woman who doesn’t know she’s an ass.”

Flynn was thinking of his deal over Pat.

“Which would you sooner be,” asked he, “a kid born amongst the working classes, the scraping classes as you call them, or a kid born amongst the upper classes?”

“It’s all a question of the pit and the gallery,” said the other, “as far as looking at life goes; one lot sees it from above, the other from below, same view only a bit different; and mind you, looking at life is three quarters part of living; the rest’s mostly eating and drinking and procreating and, seems to me, one lot has as much fun out of that as the other lot—whelks are as good as oysters, if you’re used to them.”

“Maybe—all the same—well, I don’t know, but I was thinking of children. I was thinking of a child I once got away from a little shop in a poor neighbourhood; I can’t go into details, but it was a wretched hovel of a place and the woman had a swarm of children.”

“They always do.”

“And I planted it with a woman of the upper classes who was well to do but simply lost for something to care for and look after.”

“Well, that was a good job for it, anyhow.”

“Yes maybe, but it was very young, and I’ve been wondering whether it was a good thing to take it away from its mother, even to give it a better home.”

“If, as you say, she had a swarm of other kids and was willing to let it go, I’d say it was—a woman who lets a child go to strangers like that can’t have been what they call a good mother. But the proof of the pudding is the eating, how’s the thing turning out?”

“I don’t know,” said Flynn.

There was something about Cherry other than his natural lightheartedness that made him attractive to the other, and the something came out in the fact that he was Irish, or rather partly Irish on the mother’s side, a side that matters a lot when it comes to the make-up of a man.

The Scotch are supposed to be clannish, and when they escape into England over the Grampians are supposed to get together for mutual warmth and support and advantage. I wonder, do they? but of one thing I am certain, the Irish do. Not designedly—Oh, dear no—and not for love of one another as individual men and women, but just because they are Irish. I doubt if Hennessy would have taken an Englishman home on sight and introduced him to the intimacies of his life and practice as he had done, or that Cherry would have chummed up so readily with this new acquaintance if Flynn had not been Irish.

Freemasonry—that’s the word I have been looking for, inadequate enough to express my meaning, but enough perhaps to express the something esoteric linking together the Flynn, Cherry, Hennessy tribe; a tribe that includes in its London spread the Byrnes, Gormans, Mooneys, Hannons, Caseys and, yea, even the Corkrans, all more or less prospering. When Cherry in the course of conversation heard that Casey was the name of the man who had taken over Flynn’s practice it reminded him that there was a Casey living in Tralee who had bested his mother’s family out of a piece of land in Kingstown with twenty terrace houses standing on it, blast him, “and I wish it was him that’d taken your old practice down in Endell Street. That chap will be running round at night with a bag, doing tuppenny midwifery cases whilst you’re able to lie at home with nothing to worry you.”

“Maybe, if I’m able to stick it.”

“Oh, you’ll get on all right,” said the other.

Next morning on waking up Flynn found two letters just arrived by post. One was a mean-looking missive, looking like a bill, and directed to Dr. Parsloe, the other was enclosed in a square white envelope directed to Dr. Flynn, and containing an invitation from Lady Ashdyke to an At Home on that day at 167, Portland Place.

The invitation must have been delayed in coming. People, as a rule, do not send out invitations like that for the day following, especially with R.S.V.P. in the corner; yet the postmark of despatch for the Vine Street district was of yesterday’s date.

Leaving that aside, who was Lady Ashdyke, and how had she found his address so quickly, for it was not yet in any directory?

Questions impossible to answer off hand; but the thing was better than a bill anyway, and was not uncheering, coming together with the news that Timotheus was better.

“Woke up in the night, must have, and stuffed himself with fish. I’d laid it out scarcely hoping, but it’s all gone, and him sound aslape curled up in his basket.”

Yes, it was an auspicious as well as a bright morning, and the good fairies had not done working, for as he sat down to his eggs and bacon at nine o’clock a prepaid telegram came addressed to Dr. Flynn—Harley Street.

It was from Hennessy and ran:

“Can you call on me this morning at eleven to see a case?”

Evidently a consultation—anyhow, something to do.

But the gods still seemed to be consulting together about him in a favourable sort of way for, before he had finished breakfast, James appeared with a little parcel that had just been left. It was the visiting cards he had ordered the other day.

James, having delivered the thing, paused to say a cheery word about the weather.

Pasty faced and dressed in a subdued form of livery, suitable for his occasions, James, as I have already indicated, presented a picture of youth, if not arrested, anyhow remaining, when one considered his confession of age as given to Biddy. Perhaps it was his cheerful nature that had carried him through his hotel, steamship and other experiences unspoiled; experiences that had helped, maybe, to develop his benevolent interest in the affairs of others, and his undoubted efficiency when he wasn’t capturing old ladies as patients by illegitimate means.

But, forgetting that unhappy lapse, benevolence seemed to mark all his cheerful activities, leaving aside the fact that cheerfulness is a form of benevolence.

Having disposed of the weather and the news in the papers (he read the papers) that Lord Salisbury had a cold and a rumour that the Russians were moving towards Afghanistan, he took himself off and presently Flynn departed for his consultation, arriving at Hennessy’s a little before eleven. The patient to be seen was a Mr. Forsyth residing in Lancaster Gate and suffering, so he said (Forsyth) from his heart.

He was one of those patients who diagnose their own illnesses and then send for a doctor to confirm their diagnosis. Should he differ—then let him look out.

This Hennessy seemed to convey in his private hansom as they made the short journey to Lancaster Gate.

“Besides,” finished Hennessy, “he hasn’t got a heart; cut his son adrift because he married into Bayswater, which the old chap is nearly half in now, only by the length of Lancaster Gate, and drove his wife to drink with his coldness; I used to have long talks with her before she died of phlebitis; going to bed with an icicle and getting up to a weather depression with always ice pudding for dinner was what drove her to whisky to warm her, and his front name is Gideon—can’t you see him, but you will in a minute; and remember it’s want of tone of the heart muscles he’s suffering from. His heart’s as sound as a bricklayer’s, but he badgered me into that diagnosis because he’d been reading himself up in The Family Doctor, and if I’d told him it was nervous dyspepsia helped by bad temper and not keeping his bowels open he’d have fired me. Here we are.”

Like most of the houses in Lancaster Gate, it was a splendid house.

Flynn was beginning to perceive that the benevolence of Hennessy in calling him in as a consultant in this case was not entirely one-sided. It is a good thing to have a friend as consultant in a doubtful case like this in which a patient diagnoses one way and a doctor the other.

It was a splendid house and the footman who opened the door was to match.

In the Victorian drawing-room fully dressed and reading the financial columns of The Times was seated in an arm-chair and with a rug over his knees, Mr. Gideon Forsyth.

It was just warm enough not to have a fire, hence the rug as a concession to the doubtfulness of the weather; for this old person was of the type that will give five thousand guineas for a Raeburn (he did the year before) yet save a lump of coal.

He had heavy eyelids, a domed forehead, scarcely any hair and he looked as if he were made of yellow wax.

Flynn’s diagnosis on sight was that he ought to have been dead long ago. Then he got to work with his stethoscope.

Mr. Forsyth must have been apprised of the fee by Dr. Hennessy, for as they were leaving the room to go downstairs and consult, Mr. Forsyth handed to Dr. Hennessy an envelope.

“Here’s your fee,” said the latter, handing the thing to the consultant when they were in the dining-room with the door closed.

“Do you know,” said the consultant, pocketing the envelope without looking at the contents, “I believe there is a mitral murmur that’s maybe developed since you saw him last. In fact I’d swear to it.”

“Well, think of that!” said the general practitioner, evidently forgetting all about the bricklayer’s heart! “I thought I heard a whisper of it when I first saw him a week ago, but it was so faint I put it down to me ears that have been troubling me of late. I’m not as young as I used to be and since I had the influenza last spring I get afflicted with a buzzing be fits and starts enough to drive a man crazy if I as much as look at a glass of port wine.”

“How’s your blood pressure?”

“Faith, I’ve been afraid to take it, once a man starts that sort of thing he may as well order his coffin.”

“Give me your wrist—well, your pulse is pretty full but there’s no hardening of the arteries and be thankful for that—do you ever by any chance get a touch of pain in your joints?—well, it’s clear enough it’s a gouty diathesis you’re suffering from; cut out the port and stick to John Jameson—shall we go up and see the old chap now; and what shall I say—better say nothing about that murmur if he keeps all right; if he doesn’t you can break it to the family and say you suspected it.”

“He hasn’t any family.”

“Well, that’s all the better.”

Flynn, upstairs, gave a good but guarded prognosis and won the old gentleman’s esteem by allowing him oysters which, unfortunately, the other had forbidden.

“You have to knock them off something for the show of the thing,” said Hennessy, when they were in the street, “and I pitched on oysters when he asked me might he have them, not knowing he was fond of them, but it can’t be helped, I couldn’t tell you everything and how were you to know. Well, good-bye, me boy, and drop in and see me for a smoke whenever you have the time.”

Flynn opened the envelope when he was alone, it enclosed a cheque for five guineas on Coutts’.

It was his first West End fee and it cast such a pleasant light on things that debating with himself that afternoon as to whether he would go to Lady Ashdyke’s At Home or not he decided to go. It was like fishing. The waters were unknown, but there might be something to be caught, and, anyhow, it was something to do.

He arrived at Lady Ashdyke’s a little after four.

Her house was almost next door to the house where Lady St. Helliers gave such pleasant luncheon parties to all and sundry, that is to say, near the middle of the Place and on the right as you go towards Regent’s Park.

Yes, Lady Ashdyke was receiving, to judge by the number of vehicles drawn up or drawing up at her door—and the crowd going up the stairs.

Tall and thin and no longer very young she was the wife of Sir Anthony Ashdyke, a kindly-looking old gentleman with a white beard, who had made a large fortune cotton spinning, or rather from the cotton spun for him by his factory folk.

The Ashdykes were not in the full swim of London Society; Sir Anthony was a radical and the cotton mill clung to them; they were not in the least climbers, all the same they liked to know people and, being human, to feel themselves of importance even though he had to content himself with the National Liberal Club, though indeed, his lady was a member of the Albemarle.

At this moment London was a city of movements, societies and leagues.

There was, for instance, the Women’s Suffrage Movement, holding its meetings in St. James’ Hall and led by that redoubtable woman Miss Lydia Becker; the Anti-Vivisection Society led by Miss Frances Power Cobb, and the Anti-Tobacco League, presided over by that kindly spirit Lady Arthur Arnold, the wife of Sir Arthur Arnold (brother of Edwin).

Of course there were lots of other societies and movements, but these were the three most socially important, and they were all affiliated, not officially but in a ghostly sort of way, so that in going to a meeting of the Anti-Tobacco League you would likely find yourself sitting beside or talking to a person who objected to the idea of animals being cut up alive; and, going to an anti-vivisectionist meeting, talking to a person who objected to a woman being denied a vote, though her butler was on the list of electors.

Now what had brought Flynn to-day to this At Home, which was also the most important turning point in his life, was Parsloe.

He had never seen Parsloe, Parsloe had never seen him; but he was the new man who had taken his rooms. Parsloe was a friend of Lady Ashdyke and Lady A. who was great on movements and always giving At Homes in support of the Big Three, had said to him, “There are a lot of people coming on Thursday to meet Miss Frances Power Cobb—no speeches or anything like that, just socially, and if you know anyone who may be of use or interested you might send me their names,” and Parsloe knowing that the great desideratum was numbers—people overflowing into Portland Place, if not crushed to death on the stairs, sent in the longest list he could think up, throwing in his successor. Dr. Flynn—Harley Street looked well, anyhow.

Flynn, having entered and presented his card of invitation to a lady, his hostess’s secretary, who was doing duty as a sort of ticket collector (otherwise burglars and all sorts of people might have got into one of these mixed shows) passed up the stairs with the crowd to the drawing-room and made his bow to his hostess who stood at the drawing-room door receiving.

Then, mixing with the crowd he found himself face to face with no less a person than Cherry:

“Hello!” said Cherry.

Beyond that he showed no surprise at the meeting and they fell to talking, drifting at the same time through the crowd towards the tea-room.

Cherry hadn’t come by special invitation. He was attending an upper housemaid of the Ashdykes’, who believed she was a goddess (Venus to wit) and had been conducting herself accordingly and who was now upstairs awaiting a journey to Lowood. Finding the At Home on and being a friend of Lady A. he had dropped into the drawing room for a cup of tea. He knew most of the notables by sight and pointed them out. Mrs. Fawcett and the beautiful Mrs. Ashton Dilke, Lady Arnold looking like the ghost of a lady of olden years, an old gentleman with a grey imperial (her husband), Miss Muller and a lady short and stout and with a big head not diminished in size by a hat too small for it, Miss F. P. Cobb.

“She’s fighting the vivisectionists tooth and nail,” said he, “and I’m with her against Burdon-Sanderson and Schaffer and Ludwig and all the lot. I happen to be fond of animals—see that tallish chap talking to Miss Cobb, he’s Louis Wain the man who draws cats, makes them a bit too human, perhaps, but they’re good; damn good—yes, I’m fond of cats but I can’t keep one in those rooms of mine, they want a garden or yard to play about in.”

Flynn told about Timotheus and how he hadn’t taken to the kitchen but was improving.

There was an elderly lady near the tea-table; Cherry said that she was a Mrs. Pankhurst of the Suffragette lot, and the little woman she was talking to was a Mrs. Wentworth. “I must introduce you to her,” said he. “She’s not a patient of mine but her sister is; it’s rather a sad case, the girl’s quite young but got a shock that knocked her off her balance. However, I hope to get her round. The great thing in a case like that is not to let a patient feel there’s a doctor foozling after them. I don’t see her more than once a month or so, but Mrs. W. calls pretty often with news of how things are going. One of the most important things in medical practice to my mind, after the patient and the disease, is the family—whether the relatives are damn fools or common-sensical people; she’s full of common sense; and you’ll like her eyes. I’ll introduce you,” and, sure enough, Mrs. Pankhurst dropping off, he did, in his own way: “Dr. Flynn of Harley Street—he’s our latest acquisition—taken the rooms under mine; old Parsloe’s rooms—yes, he’s gone to set up in Cavendish Square and I hope he’ll like it—” Then, after a few more words, declaring that he must be going as he had several more patients to see, off he went, leaving them together.

“You are an Irishman, Dr. Flynn?” said Mrs. Wentworth.

“Faith, I believe I am,” said he, “but how ever did you find out?”

She laughed and right from that starting point their friendship began.

It is not often that two people click together like this at first.

Friendship between humans seems a thing of slow attainment, perhaps because its basis is mostly mutual trust, and humans, for a lot of reasons, ancestral as well as present, are not given to trusting one another on sight.

Perhaps there is such a thing as affinity which supplies mutual liking without any time service to help. However that may be, these two found themselves chatting one to the other easily and very pleasantly about all sorts of things, including the people present.

The sight of Louis Wain bringing up the subject of cats, he told her about Timotheus and T.’s reaction to his new environment.

“It’s like myself,” said he. “He’s not used to this part of the town.”

“And what part of the town is he used to?” asked she.

“The Drury Lane neighbourhood. I’ve come up here to try my fortune, a lot of friends bothered me to come, so I’ve come.”

“Well, that’s worth trying. I suppose it’s finding himself in a new house. Have you tried buttering his feet?”

“Biddy—she’s my servant—told me she’d put half a pound of the best cooking butter on them—of course that’s just her talk, she’s Irish.”

“Did you bring her from Ireland with you?”

“I did, and how did you know that?”

“I didn’t, I just asked. I’ve had several Irish servants and they were delightful, but they weren’t happy out of Ireland and went back. I told Dr. Cherry about the last one, and he said they don’t stick to places, only to people, and you must be an Irish person or they won’t stick to you. Not being able to turn myself into an Irish person I had to let them go. Perhaps it was as well, for they do smash cups and things—don’t they? and sweep the dust under the beds? And now I must be going myself. Goodness! it’s half-past five. And,” said she, giving him her hand, “I do hope you will have every success—and tell Dr. Cherry to let me know.”

Then she became one of the crowd, vanishing no doubt to find her hostess and say good-bye.

A little later Flynn found himself in Portland Place. He turned into the Langham for a cigarette and glass of sherry. The Langham was full of Americans, at least, fuller than ever. The Coronation, whose backwash was still stirring up London life, had increased the flow from the United States; the flood had passed, this was the beginning of the ebb, still it was enough.

He sat for a while on the landing above the entrance stairs watching them coming in and going out. They had little to do with his thoughts. He was looking at Mrs. Wentworth:

“You will like her eyes,” had said Cherry.

A man less gifted with his subtle appreciation of things in the world of sanity as well as in the world of lunacy might have said with truth: “She has lovely eyes,” yet missed the truth that loveliness and friendliness to all the world are not properties always combined.

She had said something about Cherry letting her know how he was getting on.

Having offered and refused himself another glass of sherry he came out of the Langham and towards Regent Street. It was now a good bit after six and Biddy would be getting about preparing dinner; most likely chops.

Biddy, within her limitations, was an excellent cook. The foundational quality of all good cookery is the ability to boil a potato as a potato ought to be boiled, after that the ability to deal with greens as they ought to be served, and with salt, as it ought to be left out or put in. She exhibited all these abilities and many more. But she was not strong on the subject of menus; a bit lacking, perhaps, in the powers of prevision and constructive imagination she was apt more often that it was perhaps absolutely necessary to take refuge in chops; as against this she was not a person to grumble over much if he was late or failed to return for dinner. With this knowledge in his subconscious mind he did not bend his steps homeward but came down Regent Street and presently finding himself in Old Compton Street and on familiar ground, turned into Roche’s.

Monsieur Roche, a good many years before, coming to London to make his fortune as a restaurant keeper, had pitched his café in Old Compton Street. The fame and perfume of his cabbage soup spread through the town, and the fact that here for eighteen pence you could get one of the best dinners in London; also one of the best wines, which is, or was, ordinary vin ordinaire.

There were no separate tables; an ordinary long old-fashioned table d’hôte table served.

Roche’s is now, like Prosser’s of Chancery Lane and other desirable places, a dream belonging to a happy past; but to-night it was a reality, and packed to capacity with artistic Bohemians and a few untidy-looking foreigners.

But Flynn did not take much notice of them, or of the menu, or of the wine that Hewin the waiter had uncorked for him. His mind was too much engaged with the picture of Mrs. Wentworth.

He woke up next morning to find another patient requiring him, but not a new one.

The message came in the form of a telegram, handed in at seven-thirty, received eight-ten:

He arrived at Cunningham Mansions a little after ten and Margaret admitted him. She did not say much, but she did not look cheerful.

Every doctor will know the atmosphere of the house where the patient is not improving.

Julia received him in the sitting-room; she was dressed for going out, and as they sat opposite to one another he noticed that she did not look quite herself.

He had suspected that Pat had been giving bother again, but she said nothing of this.

As a matter of fact she had sent for him to speak about the possibility of her having to run over to Ireland for a few weeks, owing to the property that had been left to her.

“There are things to sign and all sorts of things to be done,” said she. “It’s a nuisance, but property is always a nuisance. However, I am waiting to hear from my aunt who has everything in hand, and I wanted to know, if I have to go, whether you will keep an eye here to Margaret and all that.”

Margaret and all that, meant, of course, Pat.

“Yes, to be sure I will,” said he.

Then they talked about things, he telling the Harley Street news, and she news of things in Ireland.

He had caught her whilst she was waiting to go out to see Jameson, of Gower Street, the English representatives of the Dublin solicitors, who had the property business in hand.

“Of course, I’d have waited for you if you hadn’t called so early,” said she, referring to her telegram. “But, now that you have come, I’ll just go and see them, and leave you to Margaret.”

He saw her to the door of the flat and Margaret took him in to see her charge.

He had thought from her manner when she had admitted him that the patient might be worse, but Pat had conducted himself fairly well during the night.

What seemed bothering Margaret was not Pat, but the prospect of being left alone to do for him if her mistress went to Ireland. Responsibility was something that she evidently did not care for.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said she, “but it seems to me he’s not seeming to hold his own same as he was that night when you brought him here first, that night when I undressed him and him kickin’ and strivin’. It’s not that anything’s the matter with him so much as that he isn’t seemingly what he was.”

To Flynn the thing in the bassinette seemed pretty much the same as before. Patrick was sleeping now, and not to be disturbed for examination. Hornets’ nests are best left alone by the finger of inquiry, but it seemed to him that the child hadn’t quite as much colour as in the first days of its transplantation; but this was perhaps a fancy due to Margaret’s words.

“There’s no knowing,” said she, “what the mother of a waif and stray might have been feeding it on; if it was the breast she give it that’s maybe why it doesn’t take to the bottle as it should. Though it sucks plenty it seems to strive against it when down.”

He knew as a fact, and from remembered pictures, that Mrs. Ginnis did not bring her babies up on the bottle. The bottle was evident enough in the Ginnis household, but not in that way.

However, he could say nothing of this, and having assured Margaret that in the event of her mistress’s absence in Ireland, he would keep an eye on things, he took his departure.

He had never thought of this feeding business before, even though one of his tenets born of instinct and experience was that, for a child, the milk of a cow was a very poor substitute for the milk of a mother or wet nurse.

Pat had given the unfortunate man so many things to think of that this little teasing thought had not entered his mind before.

So many things to think of; for it was through Pat that Jane Hancock had entered into the business of pushing him towards Harley Street, even to the point of suggesting Parsloe’s rooms. That was the final greasing of the slide along which she had pushed him to the best of her ability. Yes, without Pat there would have been no Jane at work and Julia would not have been so insistent on his coming to the West End, urged to that insistency by Jane.

Well, all this and a lot more had employed his mind so fully that the question of infant feeding had remained in the background; even now, when it had obtruded itself it was of small importance beside the question of Julia’s manner.

She was just the same this morning as of old, but with a slight difference. Her gaze, always frank and free was perhaps as free and frank as ever, but it was not so concentrated. It was not evasive, but a bit detached, like the gaze of a person carrying on a conversation and at the same time listening to a tune or trying to remember a name.

She had not come in with him to see Pat, leaving that business to Margaret; and she was possibly going to Ireland for a few weeks, content to leave P. in the sole charge of Margaret and himself.

That implied confidence—or was it possibly loss of interest?

“Women are the strangest things in the world.” He remembered his old mother saying that relative to a Mrs. Rafferty who had ‘gone sour’ on her child and put it out on a hot shovel for the fairies to take back, evidently considering it a changeling.

Was Julia preparing to go sour on Pat?

Had the delightful business of looking after a child, plus the joys of wakefulness produced by its squealing produced a deteriorating effect?

He couldn’t tell, but one thing he felt certain; this call to Ireland was genuine enough; it was not a means of escape from the troubles of motherhood. All the same, it implied that for some weeks, at least he would be possessed of the joys, as well as the troubles, of father-hood. For incontestably he was the father of the thing—anyhow, of the situation.

Mrs. Victoria Wentworth lived at 102, Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park, a not highly fashionable yet not unfashionable address.

It might have been said of the inhabitants of Cambridge Terrace that he or she, as the case might be, was probably possessed of an income of a couple of thousand a year. Mrs. Wentworth’s income was about seventeen hundred when allowances had been made for certain charges on the estate of her late husband, that is to say, a thousand pounds to put up a memorial window in the church of Tickworthy near Chelmsford, and a sum of two thousand to be divided between two bastard children, long concealed, and only hinting of themselves when the reading of the will brought their names to light as fire brings to light writing in sympathetic ink.

He was not a pleasant person, Mr. Wentworth. Victoria had not married him, her mother had married her to him, and just as well perhaps, for having endured the ordeal by marriage for half-a-dozen years, she found herself comfortably off and able to assist and pay the doctor’s bills for her sister Violet.

Violet, her only relative or dependant, had started in life as a healthy and happy child, full of exuberant vitality; then, at the age of twelve or so, she had gone suddenly off and become a wreck of her former self; her mind was not much affected and the whole thing had to do with those surprise packets, the ductless glands. But in those days ductless glands were not in the medical vocabulary.

Cherry was the only doctor that did the girl any good. Not knowing what was the matter with her he left it at that, and having slain the reputation of Dr. Pylus, the neurologist of Wimpole Street, with an epigram, and cleared out the Pylus camp following of electricians and masseuses that had settled like blowflies on the unfortunate patient, he had the good luck to see a slight improvement in her condition; anyhow, she was no worse, and the awful expenses were cut down to a minimum, and Mrs. Wentworth was very grateful.

He and she became friends, and he would turn up sometimes on her At Home days.

The people he met on these occasions were sometimes useful to him, and sometimes not; sometimes interesting and sometimes not. They were typical of the rather mixed society that formed its circles just beneath the grand circle of London’s social life. Mrs. Wentworth’s little circle was pleasant, because she was the hub of it, and the people that moved in it though they might not all of them be Lords—and few were—had nothing about them of the pernicious qualities to be found in some Lords as well as many commoners.

You might have met the City in the form of old Mr. Pott, of Westbourne Gardens, very well-to-do, whose ambitions stretched towards, and were perhaps limited by the Mayoralty and a grave in Kensal Green; but a pleasant old gentleman and very charitable—or the Army, in the form of Sir Julius Raynes, who lived in Oxford Terrace, was at home on Sundays, and whose collection of Japanese ivory masks was famous amongst the cognoscenti; John Tenniel, of Punch, lived not so far away, and you might have found him talking to Sir Julius or to John Lane, the publisher, who lived nearby at 8, Lancaster Gate Terrace, or to Catherine Tynan, the poet, who lived somewhere up Hampstead way. These kind of people collect one another.

York Powell, of Oxford, you might have met, drawn by the Lane attraction; or the authoress of Bootle’s Baby, who lived somewhere in the vicinity of Westbourne Grove, drawing with her, Helen Mathers.

Cherry you might have met as to-day, the day after Lady Ashdyke’s reception, at which he had introduced Flynn to Mrs. Wentworth.

It was a Thursday, Mrs. Wentworth’s At Home day was Thursday, and she was glad to see Cherry for several reasons. Flynn had interested her, not only as a man of a type not frequently met with in upper middle-class London society, but also an adventurer in the medical world who had dared to plant himself in Harley Street without invitation from Fashion—or from anyone else.

Also he had interested her because he was himself.

They discussed him to-day.

“I like your friend, Dr. Flynn,” said she. “He told me he had come and set up in Harley Street, been practising somewhere in the East End—or somewhere, and he’s just come and set up in Harley Street; isn’t that a bit adventurous?”

“Well, you might call it that,” said he.

“I like him for it,” said she, “and I like him, too, and I think that’s got a lot to do with a doctor if he wants to get on. I can’t imagine Dr. Fell getting on in Harley Street, no matter how clever he might be.”

“Oh, I think he’ll get on,” said Cherry, “but it is a bit rum the way he’s decanted himself, he and an old woman servant and a cat into Parsloe’s rooms. Parsloe has decanted himself into Cavendish Square, and so it goes on.”

Mrs. Wentworth laughed:

“We must try and get him some patients,” she said. “Something that doesn’t matter much whether they go right or wrong, though it’s often a thankless business. I remember recommending Mrs. Hastings, a connection of mine, who thought she had rheumatoid arthritis, to see Dr. Twybrow, and he told her she had nothing the matter with her, only nerves, and that put her in such a temper that she scarcely spoke to me for months.”

Then, dismissing the subject they talked of different matters, the phenomenally fine weather, rumours about Lord Salisbury’s health, also the speech made yesterday by that rising young politician—destined to be President of the Board of Trade three years later—David Lloyd George.

Two mornings later Flynn, awakened by Biddy bringing him his early morning tea, knew at once something was wrong.

She was sniffing. Not a word till she had arranged the little tray by the bedside, then “The ould cat’s gone,” she said.

He knew at once what she meant, but he did not speak for a moment.

“He must have went in the night,” said Biddy, “and he went aisy, he’s in his basket.”

“I’ll come down,” said he.

Then, without touching his tea, he put on his dressing-gown and came.

Timotheus was lying in his basket. Close to the basket lay an old saucer with some bits of fish on it.

“He didn’t more than half ate his supper,” said Biddy, as she bent down and took away the bit of old rug she had half covered him with, “and there he lays as I found him.”

Then she began to cry, and Flynn, with a parting glance at the sleeper that would never more awake, turned, with a few words of comfort to the mourner, and came upstairs.

His tea still waited for him; it had not grown cold, but he did not drink it.

It was James who told Cherry that Dr. Flynn’s old cat was dead.

It was James who brought him up his morning papers and he generally stopped for a few words of gossip on the weather and so forth.

Cherry had a very efficient manservant by name of Strutt; with the aid of Mrs. Cooper, a lady who came in to do the cooking, he did everything necessary. But James was not to be denied as a doer of small things, and a gossip. The problem of James had sometimes occupied the mind of Cherry.

James was paid so much for his door-answering and message-bearing activities, he was paid nothing for his benevolent intentions as expressed in small acts of service and courtesy. It wasn’t a question of expecting tips. He got a tip every Christmas and the matter ended there; it was just benevolence expressing itself in action, as on the day when he had trapped that old lady patient for Flynn. On the other hand it was something for nothing, and that was something strange to find in the environment of London.

Apart from this exhibition of native goodwill towards all and sundry, James had the additional faculty of being able to think. He was quite good at thinking out things. Cherry had time and again complained to Strutt of the inability of the green baize door leading to the kitchen to keep shut—or to keep open, I forget which; anyhow, it was James, called in by Strutt as a sort of consulting-physician, who solved the problem.

Having given the cat news to Cherry, James touched on Biddy’s upset over the matter, to say nothing of Flynn’s, and on the problem of the disposal of the remains.

There was no burial ground possible at the back of the house and the idea of giving him to the dustmen for removal was not a pleasant one.

“I’ve been thinking,” said J., “that if it was put in a box it might be buried in the dog’s cemetery by the Park gates.”

“But it’s a cat,” said Cherry.

“How are they to know what it is if it’s in a box,” said James. “I expect,” he said, “it’s not the first cat that has been put there as a dog, if all was known and told.”

He seemed to speak more from knowledge than fancy. Cherry knew of the little cemetery at the Marble Arch, just inside the park gates; those gates that are only opened to let Royalty pass through; in fact, Mrs. Wentworth had a dog there, a field spaniel. Not wanting to have her heart torn again she had never possessed another dog.

The problem of how to dispose of our dumb friends has always been a problem in those parts of London where back gardens are not in evidence. Hence, dog cemeteries like the one in the park—reserved, however, this one, for aristocratic dogs.

All this passed through the queer mind of Cherry, as James went off to attend to his duties.

Cherry was not a sentimentalist, but he recognized that our dumb friends are our truest friends, maybe because they are dumb, but certainly because they are useful.

Escape valves for the power of affection that otherwise, and in some cases, would have to remain bottled and so turn sour and clotted, poisoning the mind and system. Mrs. Wentworth’s spaniel had saved her maybe from this, married as she was to Wentworth.

Cherry, before going out, looked in to see Flynn and found him doing up some accounts, and not in a very happy-seeming mood.

“James told me about the cat. I’m sorry,” said Cherry.

“Yes,” said the other. Then, after a moment, “It didn’t take here. It rather gave me a hit this morning when I found it gone like that. You see, it always used to sleep at the foot of my bed, and when I’d be smoking a pipe in the evening it would come and get into my lap; animals get to be companions, some of them.”

Cherry could see that he was hit harder than he admitted, and proceeded delicately enough to the subject in his mind.

“Thanks,” said the other, when the exponent of daring methods of burial had finished. “The thing was bothering me, to tell the truth, but I don’t see how it could be done. There must be rules—”

Cherry told of James’s words on that matter, and how Mrs. Wentworth would most likely be able to help as to the proper authorities to be approached, and the fee to be paid.

“I’ll be going near her place this morning,” said he, “and, if you like, I’ll look in on her and get to know all about it. She’ll be sure to help. She’s that sort.”

“Thanks,” said Flynn.

The sorrow in his heart for his humble friend seemed lightened, as though by the gaze of those beautiful and kindly eyes cast upon it—so we take comfort from violets strewn on tombs.

At two o’clock on the next day, everything having been put in order, the funeral cortège left Harley Street.

A four-wheeled cab containing Biddy, her master and a soap box wrapped in Biddy’s best shawl.

She had three shawls, but this, a near Paisley, she chose to be interred with the defunct. She also insisted on carrying the coffin. There were no flowers, but there was a certain sense of dignity won from the fashionable atmosphere of the surroundings. Like the Emperor Caligula’s horse throned in marble forever in our memories amidst the turmoil of ancient Rome; here forever, not throned but sleeping, would remain Timotheus amidst the turmoil of fashionable London.

Outside the gates the funeral business had not finished—it was an Irish funeral—and Flynn, having hailed another four-wheeler, stopped it at the ‘Three Crowns’ where, tell it not in Gath, the pair went into the saloon bar. Hot whisky and water, a lump of sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice (with a bit of the rind) is a helpful medicine with which to combat cold or depression.

Next day, to cheer things up a bit, a letter came by the early morning post. It was contained in a large white square envelope sealed with a big red seal, exhibiting a lion on its hindlegs clawing at the air.

The thing had an appearance of Royalty, it was, however, only Mr. Forsyth.

It stated in tones of old world courtesy, through which, however, could be detected the tone of modern world business, that he, Mr. Forsyth, felt so much benefited by Dr. Flynn’s visit that he would like Dr. Flynn to undertake his case. Dr. Hennessy had visited him twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, he would like Dr. Flynn to continue in this practice, if possible, on terms to be arranged. Would Dr. Flynn call upon him as early as it was convenient, to-day if possible, so that matters might be settled.

“Damn!” said Flynn, when he had perused this epistle and put it back in its envelope.

The idea did not suit him at all. Here was a good patient right enough, but to take him from the good Hennessy was impossible. It would have been possible enough to a lot of doctors but not to Flynn.

Yet in what terms could he refuse? If he went to Forsyth and said that Hennessy was his friend, Forsyth would doubtless reply that it was not a question of friendship but medicine; that he had a perfect right to change his doctor, and that he would follow the routine course of writing to Hennessy apprizing him of the change. As if that would make things any better from the robbed one’s point of view!

Flynn having debated this matter in his mind looked at his watch. It was half-past nine. Taking his hat he left the house and, finding a hansom, drove to Porchester Terrace.

On the way it occurred to him that it was possible that the oysters had done it. H. had forbidden oysters as an article of diet, for no special reason but just as something to say, something to forbid. Patients are very much like children in a lot of ways, and a child robbed of a tart or a treat has a grudge against the robber. The old gentleman had been robbed of his oysters and the man from Harley Street had restored them. Possibly that was it.

“And so you’ve been stealing me patients,” said Hennessy before the other could speak. “Don’t be telling me; I had a letter from him this morning—”

“That’s what I’ve come to see you about. I had a letter from him too, telling me he wanted me to take him on. Of course I won’t do any such thing—”

“And why not?”

“He’s your patient. I’d just as soon go and sweep a crossing, as make money like that.”

“And that’s what you’ll be doing if you’re so particular in a London practice. We all bag each others patients if we can. Tcha, man, take the old blighter and put him in your bag, I’m not bothering.”

“Still—”

“Go on and take him; he’s been pluming for flight the last month, like the old chap that owned the grandfather’s clock. But there’s one thing.”

“Yes?”

“One provision I insist on, as the old lady said who took the ham on a railway journey. It’s just this, you’ve got to charge him double what I’ve been charging him.”

“And what have you been charging him?”

“A guinea a visit.”

“All right,” said Flynn, “and I hope it chokes him off.”

He did not, somehow, relish the prospect of Forsyth as a patient, even as a gift, but when he got round to Lancaster Gate, somewhere about twelve (having taken a walk in Kensington Gardens and a look at Peter Pan) he found the old gentleman in such a kindly-seeming mood that the prospect brightened. Much less stiff seemed Mr. F. and seemingly more human.

Patients, leaving their diseases aside, vary from day to day, so do well people. It is a psychic fluctuation that must be taken account of in a doctor’s navigational problems, and it is the same with the poor as the rich, as, witness, Mrs. Ginnis, who, one morning might have been found with her apron over her head, howling over some real or fancied grievance, and the next, with the grievances almost the same, singing like a lark, and banging away at the ironing board.

Mr. Forsyth was doing nothing like that, but he was cheerful and pleasant; a few words sufficed to adjust the monetary side of the business. That he was being charged double for being tinkered with was a fact that did not trouble him; the magic words ‘Harley Street’ covered all that.

Buying a shirt at Beale and Inman’s in Bond Street you expect to pay more than if you were buying it from Smith of High Street, Hackney. Indeed, he would have been content to pay even more than two guineas; but he did not express that fact, or only through the small bottle of Pommery that presently appeared on a salver with two glasses.

It was almost like the christening of a new ship; though even in the Cunard I doubt if they would do the business with Pommery 1898.

Warmed with a sip of champagne Mr. F. talked of other things than his diseases; indeed, this was not a professional interview but a social one, and would not go down in the bill, as he managed to let Flynn discover in some occult way, and finally, on parting, by the words “Well, on Monday I will expect you to call upon me as my doctor, and I wish you a very good day.”

But before those parting words he had done a good deal of talking about England in general, the Government in particular, the new monarch and the district round Lancaster Gate. There were a lot of interesting people living just then in Lancaster Gate including the John Morgan Richards and their daughter John Oliver Hobbes; but he did not talk of them. He was more district, than people-minded; more interested in rents than mental values.

In the street, at last, Flynn turned his steps homeward, assured, anyhow, of four guineas a week (paid on the nail and without sending bills) for talking nonsense to an old gentleman for half an hour twice a week. Two golden sovereigns and two shilling no less.

Harley Street was beginning to develop its hidden if doubtful qualities. To make profit out of the name of a street would seem incompatible with the carrying on of a grave and learned profession, just as humbug seems incompatible with reason. But the fact is that just as no man can practise medicine with a perfectly straight face, so he cannot carry on that art without a certain amount of humbug and deception.

The humouring of human creatures is just as important, up to a certain point, as the physicking of them.

Truth blurted out is sometimes as fatal as arsenic, as Dr. Glumb, who never tells lies, could tell if he told the tale of the man he murdered by telling him he was suffering from incurable heart disease. But G. cannot tell that tale because he does not know it. Just as he does not know that he mistook tobacco heart for a worse mischief. Ignorance in medicine is bad, but combined with strict honesty of speech it is worse.

Flynn, a clever man and a fairly clever doctor, knew all this and didn’t bother much about how he was making a street work for him disguised as a reputation. The street was not only working for him but working for a patient’s good by inspiring confidence.

He left it at that. He was thinking of Mrs. Wentworth.

A woman was selling violets at a street corner, and he bought a bunch.

Poor Timotheus, if he had never done anything else in his visit to this world, had certainly brought a man closer to a woman.

At the corner of Wimpole Street Flynn stopped and gave sixpence to the crossing sweeper by way of acknowledgment of the Forsyth deal. Maybe Fortune likes to be tipped liked that, at all events old Mike Carey, well known and maybe still vaguely remembered for the patch on the side of his face got in the Battle of Inkerman, did, and the blessing he uttered maybe followed the donor as he pursued his way home, and maybe, didn’t.

At home Flynn found luncheon waiting for him and news. Margaret had been to say that Julia Corkran had been called to Ireland that morning by ‘talygram,’ that Pat wasn’t looking any too bright, and would he——

“All right,” said he, taking his seat at table whilst Biddy stood, the inverted dish-cover still in her hand, “I’ll look in and see him—there’s nothing else been, I suppose?”

“Nothing but a man trying to sell a book full of quare pictures of people’s insides. He’s left a ‘pamflet’ about it.”

She fetched the pamphlet and he glanced at it as he ate.

It was about gynaecology, price forty-two shillings and sixpence, then being unloaded on the medicinal world of London by a Yankee speculator.

The tout had evidently shown Biddy one or two of the brightest and most appealing pictures; automatically, as the seller of a vacuum cleaner will show its insides to the most unlikely purchaser. It is something to do and one never can tell—anyhow, the pamphlet with its blurb about the book kept his mind busy and away from bothering over Julia and her affairs, and this visit to Pat.

Getting along towards three o’clock he paid it, and found that it was really a visit to Margaret.

Margaret, left alone in full charge of the flat and its contents, was already beginning to ferment in her mind, and the head that held the mind was exhibiting symptoms of the process in the form of neuralgia pains.

When you are hiring an Irish servant of the type of Margaret—a type by no means obsolete—you are sometimes hiring, at the same time, an inspector-general of your affairs, an intelligence always working in your interests, yet capable of digging out your most hidden faults and circumstances—other things, too.

What was really working like a worm in the soil of Margaret’s intelligence at the present moment was the fact that the young man who had once been a factor in Julia’s life was back again—or at least getting in through the window. The young man she had consoled herself for with a Pekingese.

It was a letter from Jane Hancock that had disclosed something of the matter—and why shouldn’t an honest servant read a letter left lying about?—anyhow, she had, and, adding the letter to other things what she had in her mind amounted to this.

Julia, owing to her inheritance of old What’s-his-name’s money, which, on top of her own, made a tidy sized fortune, had evidently become more desirable in the eyes of the young man who had cooled off from her. Or it may have been that Jane Hancock, who had always wanted the match, had conceived that this ought to be so, and was working her works in Ireland so as to bring the pair together again.

In this unhappy event Margaret would lose a mistress she had learned to love, if not always to honour and obey.

Besides all this, there was the question of Pat, who would have to be either burked or explained, in the event of Julia’s marrying. His solid existence was a fact rather too solid to rest safely on the fictional explanation that he was Margaret’s sister’s child.

If Margaret had possessed even a childless sister the thing would have been better under the test of inquiry. “And since I haven’t a sister at all,” said she, “what’s the good of talking?”

All these fancies, facts and suppositions were poured out before the unhappy Flynn, as he sat on the couch of the sitting-room, she standing before him.

The same couch where Julia had been lying that day reading The Celtic Twilight, and maybe with the vision of this infernal young man poking its head at her from the past.

When Flynn had presented Miss Corkran with a lost baby to take the place of her lost dog, he had never envisaged anything like this.

Though not too old for marriage, she had evidently appeared in his mind—that mind so quick to jump to conclusions and deeds of the heart—as a permanent old maid.

Well, look at the thing now! If Margaret was right Pat might convert himself from a troublesome baby into a troublesome problem.

In that event it would be a problem for Julia and her aunt to solve, a business for them to explain away; so why should Flynn trouble about it?

Well, it’s just this way. The imaginative human mind is always hunting for imaginary troubles, like a truffle dog for truffles. Flynn’s mind was of that type. The question remained. Was this an imaginary trouble? Time alone could answer that.

Said he to Margaret: “Well, I wouldn’t be worrying too much about it if I were you. What did you say the young fellow’s name was?—you don’t remember—there you are, it’s as likely as not Miss Hancock’s huntin’ green hares—and now let’s go in and look at himself.”

Himself was asleep in his bassinette with a woolly dog beside him. He seemed all right, though a bit maybe on the pale side. It is pleasant to think that children’s toys maybe love their owners. The woolly dog seemed nestling close up to its owner in a loving manner, and Flynn, looking down at the pair of them, pursed out his lips.

He was thinking of Julia gone off to Ireland to look after her property. Well, she’d be able to rest at night without having her sleep disturbed. He said this to Margaret and then went off, promising to look in again soon.

When a doctor leaves a patient’s house and goes out into the street, he generally takes the patient with him for an airing; anyhow, for discussion.

“What the devil is the matter with him?” “Was I right in giving him colchicum?” and so forth.

Pat, who had turned into a patient, was being taken along now by Flynn, as he walked in the direction of Oxford Street, wheeling a sort of mental perambulator, and with Julia Corkran walking beside him, discussing the patient in the pram.

It is not a question of “What the devil is wrong with him?” but of “What the devil are we to do with him?”

Of course, under certain eventualities.

Julia made very little contribution to the discussion, refusing utterly to say whether the young man of Margaret’s fancy was a fancy or a possible reality.

But there was another question, to be answered by Flynn alone. If he had failed to make a mother of Julia by dumping Pat on her had he succeeded, quite unconsciously, in making a father of himself? For, to tell the truth, the pale and ‘peaky’ look of Pat’s little face to-day had caused an unaccustomed stirring in his heart. The woolly dog had also said something in a language not yet quite translated.

Strangely enough, Timotheus from his splendid, yet isolated position in the cemetery designed for none such as he, seemed saying something, or trying to say something, about loneliness.

Certainly, even amidst the most splendid surroundings in the world, it is a bad world to be alone in.

It was now a few minutes to four o’clock.

Cherry, yesterday, had given the address of that kind helper, Mrs. Wentworth. Flynn had said he would call and thank her. He determined to do so now. At this hour she would probably be in. So leaving the perambulator for fancy to wheel home, he took a hansom for Cambridge Terrace.

Yes, Mrs. Wentworth was in.

He was shown up to the drawing-room and left to wait.

It was a pleasant room with a fire burning merrily on the hearth, and a little tea-table near the hearth with silver and Sèvres china on it, and half a Buzzard’s Dundee cake, some thin bread and butter, and a pot of apricot jam.

It was nearly quarter past four.

The hour for tea in these days had shifted from five o’clock (Central Victorian time) to half-past four, or sometimes four. Mrs. Wentworth was either late or early for the business, anyhow, there were only two tea cups, so she evidently was not expecting much company.

The visitor, having taken a seat, looked about him.

Wentworth, without being a Jew, had possessed all a Jew’s knowledge and prescience as regards art, in the form of furniture.

There were rich Gentile houses just then in Bayswater (and indeed, elsewhere) in which people sat down to dine with the aid of solid mahogany, and pictures of ancestors in foot-thick gold-frames; where the after-dinner gentlemen used to trickle upstairs (against the laws of gravity and the desire for more wine) into drawing-rooms furnished with Broadwood grands and possibly an aspidistra or two.

But Bayswater Jewry furnished better; maybe from its innate artistic sense, maybe from the example of its leaders; for these were the days when Nathaniel, Alfred and Leopold Rothschild were powers in the land, and 148, Piccadilly a treasure house of art.

Flynn did not know very much about furniture or the part it can play in life for good or evil, all the same, he could feel pleasure in these surroundings; in the peace of non-conflicting things and colours; the quietude of marqueterie with its ghostly tulips and motionless birds.

The door opened and Mrs. Wentworth came in. She had guessed at once the reason of this visit and had half expected it; her friendly manner told him that. Evidently, and right from the first, and with the intuitive instinct possessed by animals and women, she had liked Flynn, and to be liked by Mrs. Wentworth was to be taken into the warmth of her magnetic field, a warmth strangely like that of summer.

It was also to be put at ease—everything is easier in summer.

The only trouble was that to be liked by Mrs. Wentworth you had to be a likeable person.

Flynn evidently was, at all events, in her eyes.

Whilst they were talking of the late lamented and the funeral arrangements, tea was brought in by a trim maid-servant who, departing, took away with her a little dish that had been standing on the tea table. It would not be wanted to-day.

It belonged, in fact, to Othello, Mrs. W’s black cat. He always had tea in the drawing-room, but Mrs. Wentworth, when she heard the name of her visitor, had ordered O’s tea to be served to him in the kitchen.

It was a nice thought, to save Flynn from having tea in company with a burly and very much alive black cat (the colour of the late departed had been black, according to Cherry). Perhaps only women can have thoughts like this; women, who, whatever else they may save, are certainly great savers of situations.

Thanks having been offered over the mortuary business, the conversation took a more cheerful turn towards the practice, and how it was progressing.

He told of Hennessy and Mr. Forsyth, and the telling did not bore her.

It is a commonplace truth that the failures of other people give us, if not pleasure, at least complacency, it is also true that, if they are not enemies, their successes act in a like manner, according to our natures.

The tale of the Forsyth bulb pushing up like a crocus in an otherwise bleak garden, pleased Mrs. Wentworth so much that, inspired by the warmth of her interest in his affairs, he presently found himself telling of that other bulb pushing up in a soil doubtful if not bleak.

Pat, no less.

He found himself telling her all about Pat.

Once he had started he had to go right back to the beginning. He told everything without, of course, giving any names, and Mrs. Wentworth listened.

During the recital the maid-servant came in to say that an old Mrs. Weatherby, of Lexham Gardens, had called to speak about the St. Andrew’s Christian Mission, and was in the dining-room.

“Tell her I have got a headache,” said Mrs. Wentworth, and continued listening.

He did not take his departure till near six.

When he was gone, kneeling by the fire and giving it a poke to liven it up, she spoke her opinion on the whole matter, half aloud.

“Well, of all the lunatics!” said she; but with a smile pleasant as the firelight.

Now there was in Ireland an old gentleman by name O’Brien, living recently in Carlow, and not unassociated with the bacon curing trade.

I say living recently for, at the moment I am speaking of, he was in the Carlow cemetery, having died a week ago.

Mr. Patrick O’Brien had possessed two daughters, Louisa and Jeanie. Louisa had married Mr. Patrick Considine, of Athy, a marriage which her father resented, Jeanie had married Mr. James Flynn, of Dublin, a marriage not quite approved of by her father, yet not entirely resented. Both these ladies were now dead.

One day, a week or so after the doings in our last chapter, Flynn came down to breakfast and found that the post had brought him three letters. A letter from Gregson, the drug people, redirected on from Endell Street and enclosing a bill for seven and sixpence marked ‘acct. rendered,’ a letter asking a subscription for Mrs. Neurapath’s Home for Old Horses (a fruit evidently of the At Home in Portland Place) and a letter marked with the Dublin postmark, also redirected on from Endell Street.

Gregson’s bill put him into such a taking, for he was sure it had been paid though heaven alone knew where the receipt was, that he neglected the other letters for a moment.

However, when he opened the one from Dublin he got the surprise of his life.

It was from his father.

The old gentleman wrote a hand that age had not improved, nor had age lessened in any way the always discursive tendency of his mentality when his communications were of an extra business nature.

“Why, you haven’t eaten your egg,” cried Biddy when she came in to clear away the breakfast things.

“Biddy,” said he, “I’ve been left a fortune.”

“Well, that’s better than losing one,” said she, thinking he was joking till he read her out the essential lines of the letter.

She showed no great excitement. Money with her was something that the people above her had got. Her master had always had it, enough anyhow for their way of life. She had favoured the move from Endell Street, but it was not money she was after but position—for him.

She was great on Position, though personally she had no use for the article.

All the same she was pleased, very pleased—but not with the neglected egg.

“Cold or not, you’ve got to eat it,” said she, as though talking to a child. “Either that or I’ll go down and boil you another one—going around with your stomach empty and this ’fluenza about.”

“All right,” said he, “I’ll eat it.”

He did, and as he did so—there’s never a rose without a thorn—the impudent drug bill for the seven and sixpence he was sure he had paid, got at him again with spoiling effect; spoiling his spoiled breakfast anyhow.

However the thorn prick did not last.

He was pleased because now, though he might not succeed in Harley Street he could not starve or go out of it into the workhouse.

He felt good cards were being dealt to him, not a tremendously good hand, but good enough to play with. A million would have shocked him, just as a trout would be shocked if put to swim in champagne. Swimming in unearned success, success never could be earned. It would have been a bath of poison to energy.

Well, anyhow, it was not a million.

Smoking the pleasant pipe of reflection after the breakfast things had been cleared away—with a peep into the egg shell to see that the egg had been duly eaten—the inheritor of Mr. O’Brien’s money took stock of the situation and thought of the morrow.

Well, anyhow, if more Forsyths didn’t sprout in the garden, the bailiffs wouldn’t be put in—that was his homely way of looking at the matter on the financial side. He would have liked to have run off to tell Hennessy or, better still, Mrs. Wentworth—if only for the sure smile with which she would have welcomed the news, but he was not the man to throw up his hat over himself.

He would give Biddy a new shawl, better than the one she had buried with—no, he could not do that, and, at the thought, Timotheus came into his mind casting a vague momentary shade. He had often picked Timotheus up to tell him things, but he could never tell him this golden tale.

The joys of money have, sometimes, dubious spots in them.

Well, anyhow, safe from the workhouse if things came to the worst, Flynn, when he had finished his pipe, looked at his mental visiting list. It had only one patient on it, Mr. Forsyth, and this was not his day. Then having told Biddy that he mightn’t be in to luncheon and yet he might, and anyhow, if he wasn’t not to bother and that, if he was, the remains of the cold mutton would do, he took his stick and hat and went out.

Presently he was in an omnibus going east.

He had been wanting to look in on Casey and see how he was getting along, and pricking this desire into action was that drug bill for seven and six which he was sure he had paid, and some record of which might be found in an old file of receipts he believed he had left in a cupboard—if Casey hadn’t thrown them out—the bother of Money!

Opposite to him in the omnibus was seated a young man he could not place at all. He had a placid but objectionable looking face, he was dressed in a brown overcoat of the old ‘Newmarket’ cut; he had a stick between his knees and his two gloved hands rested on the top of the stick. The hands never moved and the whole figure was suggestive of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks.

Presently the waxwork got up and left the bus and the woman it had been sitting beside moved a bit, the conductor said to her: “Have you lost anything, mam?” She put her hand into the back pocket of her dress and there was an outcry. Her purse was gone.

But how did he do it? She had difficulty in getting her own hand into the pocket. “Fortunately,” said she in answer to a question from the conductor, “there was only five shillings in it,” and Flynn saw the whole game and how she had helped to play it. The conductor was a confederate. He would know, now, when it came to sharing the swag what the takings were, straight from the horse’s mouth.

It was a little bit of London. Omnibus London, not much different from four-in-hand London and perhaps better than Lombard Street, London. A strange carnival procession, each group under a banner with the strange device: ‘Look out for your purse.’

It chilled him a bit. But the woman who had lost her purse was in evident distress. She was poor but respectable-looking, pale nervous, thin.

“How unfortunate,” said Flynn, “same thing happened to me some time ago (lie) and just the same amount of money, put me out a lot over cab fares. Let me make good the loss. I will give you my card and you can repay me whenever you are my way. I live in Harley Street.”

The woman demurred, but not very decidedly. Then, having pressed his card and the money on her, he left the bus, her gratitude following him, in half spoken words but surely. As he left he turned and looked the conductor steadily in the face telling that individual exactly what he was, without a word.

It was a satisfactory, two-sided, warming incident; a villain reproved if not punished, a dame, if not a damsel, rescued from an undeniably unpleasant financial situation if not from a dragon.

There is nothing pleasanter than to do good if you can see the good you have done. A pound given to charities or hospitals does good but the result is not spectacular, it is different with a shilling given into the hand of a poor man—or woman—and giving is at times even pleasanter than spending, as St. George must have felt when he gave the Dragon socks.

With the Dragon and the fame behind him St. Flynn entered Endell Street in quite a good humour with himself and the world.

A barrel organ was playing in front of the old surgery and some children were dancing to it, and a lady was beating a rug at the side door.

She was Casey’s Irish servant. Not the one he had brought with him to be returned in a few days owing to incurable home-sickness, but another got from a registry office in St. Martin’s Lane and labelled ‘Norah.’

“Well, I’ll be sure,” said she, when the visitor had made himself and his business known, “but he’s out to his rounds. But won’t you step in all the same for I’m expecting him back any minute, and he wouldn’t want you to be sent away—aff with you and take your noise away or go and play it in front of the fish shop, he’s out and there’s no money for you—Thim organ grinders!”

She turned and led the way upstairs, same old stairs, same old dust, same old step wanting repairing, same old sitting-room but perhaps a bit less cheerful. “He’s near run to death by them midwifery cases,” said she, as the visitor took a seat, “and that’s what makes him late in his rounds, if it isn’t here it’s there, but I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to be going away till he’s back. No sir, I didn’t see any old bills on a file in the kitchen cupboard, but will you be plazed to come down and have a look for yourself?”

He came down. Same old kitchen with the addition of a ghost—the ghost of Timotheus. They say animals haven’t ghosts—haven’t they?

There were no bills in the cupboard. Nothing but a web and a hopeful spider and some old bottles. He came upstairs with a glance in at the surgery, Norah following him back to the sitting-room. He had a feeling that, much as she might possibly trust him on his face value, the fact of his being a stranger to her imposed caution. The caution of a dog, polite to a stranger but not leaving him alone in a room with property about. Unlike a dog, however, she was not dumb and without questioning her directly he got to know more or less how the practice and the patients were getting on, well, it seemed, for they were after him by day and by night: “It’s come here and come there, and the wonder to me he’s any legs left on him at all.”

But evidently he had, for at that moment they heard him coming up the stairs.

Dr. Casey had not decreased in stature, indeed he seemed longer if anything, though maybe a bit thinner; his eyes, though bright no doubt with health, had all the same acquired something of the look of the eyes a hare casts over her shoulder.

He had started when qualified a year ago as assistant to a Dublin physician, old Dr. Dooley, of Green Street. He had done the poor patients so well for Dr. Dooley that the prospect of doing them better on his own account in the greater field of London had led him to Endell Street. It seemed good business—well, he was busy, anyhow.

“And how are you?” cried he, shaking hands with the man who had put him into the mill, “but I needn’t be asking you that for it’s well you’re looking.”

Then they settled down to talk.

And the talk was mostly about Ireland on Casey’s part—one doesn’t talk of toothache or, as in his case, a backache. As to the practice, Flynn gathered that the backache was doing well, maybe a bit too well, and he left it at that.

It is pleasant when one sells a house not to receive complaints from the buyer about drains or roofs with a hint that the purchase money should be refunded.

Casey’s drains seemed all right despite the fact that they seemed draining him.

Out in the street again Flynn turned his footsteps towards Sardinia Street.

Men’s motives are rarely absolutely simple, and the motive behind this journey to-day had not only to do with Gregson’s bill and the desire to see how Casey was getting along but the desire to see a lady—at least look at her. Mrs. Ginnis, no less.

Problems, like motives, are also rarely simple, and the problem of Pat was duplex in nature. Mrs. Ginnis was part of it.

Pat’s health condition had begun to disturb, if even slightly, the mind of the doctor—suppose it should deteriorate even more!

Pat’s social position with Julia gone off to Ireland like that was also a factor in the Pat problem.

Suppose—ghastly idea—that she never came back. But that was absurd, besides there was always Margaret for a stand by. All the same, this gentleman during the last few days had once or twice found himself visualizing the picture of himself, no less, carrying the child back in a basket to its natural mother and trying to explain matters; either that or having to keep it for life.

However, these thoughts were not particularly bothering him to-day, the faint urge that called on him to look at Mrs. Ginnis in her natural home was more in the nature of the urge that draws a lover or a murderer to look again at the scene of his happiness or crime. If he had found the scene burnt up, Mrs. Ginnis, cabbages, broken-down cash register, and all, the thing would have been deplorable; but it would have been a partial solution of a vexing problem.

But the little shop had not been burnt up, it was there all right and Mrs. Ginnis was at home—very much at home. All the same she was not quite the same.

As a matter of fact the Ginnises had come on disaster. More than six months ago Mr. Ginnis, with thirty shillings of his own and ten shillings got from the pawning of Mrs. Ginnis’s reputed Paisley shawl, had acquired a share in a syndicate got up by Scrofer Duffield, the horse dealer of Drury Lane, for the purchase of what seemed an old cab horse, which with name “Morning Star” clapped on it like a label and doctored and gingered up had all the same won a race on the Continent or in South America or somewhere.

At that time there were several old race-horses drawing the hansom cabs of London and maybe “Morning Star” was one of them, anyhow, he could race, and the result of the race plus what he was sold for after the race brought sixty-three pounds seventeen and sixpence into the pocket of Mr. Ginnis.

That was only a week ago.

During the week the cash registers of the public houses near by had exhibited a rise in their graphs, not very noticeable, it is true, but all the same existent. Mr. Ginnis had been steadily reduced to his present position, in bed in the attic and seemingly suffering from what nowadays we would liken to shell shock, whilst Mrs. Ginnis was in the condition of a wife who has gone through it all with nothing to support her but a little gin, or whisky as the case might be; also she was nursing a baby at the breast.

She had been expecting its arrival at the time of Flynn’s parting visit and, sure enough, it had come next day, and there she sat nursing it in the little back parlour and giving directions to Noreen who was cutting up onions for an Irish stew.

The sight of the visitant was greeted with a howl of welcome, to say nothing of delight, that brought the invalid from his bed to see what was up.

God had given Mr. Ginnis two lovely blue Irish eyes, Mr. Dunnegan, a member of the ‘Syndicate,’ had contributed a lovely black one. The ‘Rose and Crown,’ ‘Harp,’ and ‘Bell Tavern’ all had joined in the presentation of a tongue in a fur coat that looked like musquash but wasn’t—you can’t have everything, and Flynn, moved by the implorations of Mrs. Ginnis and forgetting that he was encroaching on Casey’s practice, contributed a prescription to be made up at Dwyers in Drury Lane. It was Mahaffy’s mixture, warranted by its inventor ‘to make a dead elephant get up and procreate’—but he used a shorter word. If presents could make a man happy, Paddy Ginnis had received enough, one would think, to make for felicity, and so Flynn left him, including his family circle, which included a swarm of children run in from the street, it being dinnertime, healthy looking, if not over clean.

Well, that was that, as they say, and the picture taken away by the visitor helped to soothe his mind; making the disruption of Pat from that family circle seem, if a blunder, not a crime; a picture, however, that would have been more complete in this respect if he could have cut out of it the figure of Mrs. Ginnis suckling that baby.

When he got home he found James in the hall. James with a grin on his face and the information that there was a patient waiting to be seen in the consulting-room.

“He’s one of Dr. Cherry’s patients,” said James.

“Then, for goodness sake, what did you want showing him into my room for?” asked the other.

“Well,” said James, “when I told him Dr. Cherry was out he said he would have to see a doctor at once, and seeing your name on the door plate he said he would see you, and when I said you were out he said he would wait on the chance of you coming in, so I thought it better to let him stop. His name’s Simon.”

Flynn turned to the consulting-room and opened the door. Mr. Simon, attired in a black frock coat, pin-striped trousers, and patent-leather boots, was quite a conventional figure, or would have been only he was on his knees on the floor saying his prayers.

Disturbed in his devotions he came to and stood up with the air of one awakening from a dream.

Flynn thought he would never stop standing up; he must have been six feet four, but narrow out of proportion, with a face to match in everything except its pallor.

“I beg your pardon,” said the startled Flynn.

“Granted,” said Mr. Simon, “interruptions will occur. I was interceding for grace on behalf of the forthcoming Royal Durbar—are you interested in India?”

“Yes—but——”

“I see, not very interested, well that is as may be, but we are practically strangers and I must not encroach on your time. What I really called about was a draught given me by Dr. Cherry for the purpose of giving me sleep at nights. It was quite inefficient for that purpose, and now, when I call to see Dr. Cherry I find him to be out. It was quite useless.”

“I see. Well now, hadn’t you better wait and see Dr. Cherry? I expect it won’t be long now before he’s in—or I can give him a message from you.”

“Dr. Cherry,” said the other, taking a chair without having asked, “is non-existent for me—now that I have seen you.”

“I see—quite so—but look here; I can’t possibly act as your medical man, if that’s what you mean; you are his patient, it wouldn’t be etiquette.”

“Etiquette means nothing to me,” said the other. Flynn quite believed him. “What I require is a sleeping mixture that will act. This is surely a reasonable request and has nothing to do with etiquette.”

“Quite so—quite so,” said Flynn. There was an edge in the last words that he didn’t care for, linked as it was, with a brooding expression in the eyes of this disregarder of etiquette, hinting that he might be equally disregardless of other things, if crossed.

“Quite so. Well now, we’ll see. I’ll do what I can for you. So it’s a sleeping mixture you want——”

“Yes; I believe I have already stated that fact.”

“To be sure you did. Well, now, to begin with let’s look at your tongue.”

A tongue that might have been the twin brother of Mr. Ginnis’s was presented.

“Anything wrong with the tongue?” asked the owner of it in a bantering tone, as though speaking to a person who had broken away from the main subject to a side issue.

“Nothing,” said the other whose temper had been touched by the tone of the question and was beginning to rise, “absolutely nothing. All the same it has told me exactly the sort of mixture that will put you right.”

“Good!”

“What you’ve been wanting for a long time,” continued Dr. Flynn, now ready for a fight if need be, “and that’s a black draught.” The other bowed his head slightly as if in gratitude before the shrine of Darkness.

“Thank you,” said he, “there is only one thing I implore—make it black enough.”

Flynn did this, and having written out the prescription presented it, whilst Mr. Simon, taking two sovereigns and ten shillings from his pocket, placed them on the table; then he departed full of gratitude and, no doubt, the feeling that he had been understood.

Flynn put the money in his pocket, it really belonged to Cherry, to whom he would hand it over, and later on that evening he went up to Cherry’s rooms to do so.

“Good Lord, no,” said Cherry, “you’ve earned the money if ever a man did; of all the circus I’m running he’s the one that has given me most trouble; take him for keeps if he comes back to you; but take my advice and don’t take him; even though he’s worth five thousand a year, which he is. Mad? no, just a bad border-line case, if you know what that means. He was crossed in love, that’s what started it.”

“Faith,” said the other, “he’s long enough to have been crossed several times, seems to me.”

“By the way,” said Cherry, “what did you give him?”

Flynn told.

“Well, maybe that will keep him off his knees for a few hours. Get out that chair and have a cigar. What have you been doing with yourself all day—picking up any more patients?”

Flynn told what he had been doing all day, beginning with his father’s letter and the money left to him and ending with the Ginnises.

Cherry was beginning to have a great liking for Flynn. Cherry was making a very large sum every year, and a good deal of it was made by his power of divining character. There is a lot of character at the base of lunacy and it comes out in jets and spurts, as you would know if you had much to do with the business. If he had been asked to give a broad definition of the main characteristic of all the kings and queens, cut-throats and preachers, lords and commons of the weird country he knew so well, he would have answered untrustworthiness.

It is a characteristic of the world of the sane but not a universal one—though perhaps a bit infrequent, perhaps even more infrequent in the world of children.

Cherry felt that he could trust Flynn implicitly, even with a patient—or with a tart, for the pleasant thing about Dr. Flynn was the fact that the world of children seemed not entirely remote from him—not claiming him, but not remote. Timotheus had hinted something like this, other small things too.

Perhaps that was why Mrs. Wentworth liked him, though one never can quite fathom the likings of a woman.

Cherry had already an inkling of the Pat business from words dropped in conversation, but he was to get more than that now.

Mrs. Ginnis, with that baby at her breast had, in fact, followed Flynn home, asking him questions—or rather a question, which he now found himself putting to Cherry.

“Look here,” he said, “talking of these people, the children all seemed fine and strong. I’ve noticed it amongst the poor, bad as their surroundings may be; do you think it’s maybe because the mothers feed them instead of bringing them up on bottles?”

That he was asking the question of a practitioner in lunacy, not a children’s doctor, was fitting enough, maybe, considering the whole situation. But he did not think of that.

“Upon my word, I don’t know,” replied the other. “But I’ll take the matter up with the old Duke of —— when the happy event occurs—but why do you ask me?”

“Well, it’s this way,” said Flynn. Then he told the story he had told to Mrs. Wentworth, capping it with the statement that the individual in question did not seem to be improving under present conditions.

When the recital was over Cherry said nothing for a minute; his mind seemed trying to digest the matter.

Then he said: “Well, bottle or no, you can’t take it back. There are a lot of things in life you can’t take back,” said Cherry, “and this is definitely one of them. It would be like kicking a beehive over; you’d have the whole swarm on top of you and not only on you. There’s this woman—this girl you planted the thing on; she’d be had in, if only indirectly. Fleet Street would see to it, and I can see the Daily Hulabaloo with all your pictures in it; you mustn’t let her in for that, these news hounds to make a scoop out of her.”

“There’s no fear of that,” said Flynn. “The thing’s fixed and done for as far as I’m concerned, only it just worried me for a moment. Anyhow, it was all done for the best. You see I thought I’d hit two birds with one stone, giving her something to care for and it better surroundings and a prospect in life——”

“Oh, don’t worry yourself—can’t you see the whole business started, not with you, but that child Eileen——”

“Noreen.”

“Well, Eileen or Noreen—you say she lied and ran home and told her mother the thing had been taken from her by a man with a black beard. If she’d told the truth, that she’d left it on your door-step, the mother would have flung a shawl over her head and rushed round to you to see if you knew anything about the matter and everything would have been all right.”

“Faith, but you’re a genius,” said Flynn, “I never thought of that.”

He felt greatly relieved.

For a moment he felt that the whole matter was cleared up as far as he was concerned and that all his responsibilities had been shifted on to the small back of Noreen.

We have these momentary feelings.

When a man starts a literary practice by writing a book he first seeks for a publisher and then for publicity. When a man starts a medical practice he has no need to seek for a publisher but he has every need for publicity, and he will find, just as the writing man will find, that the best of all publicity agents is the public.

It is what men say to one another about a book that counts; it is what women say to one another about a doctor that matters.

Now Mr. Forsyth had a relative, a Mrs. Hyslop, who lived in Hanover Crescent, who had a friend, a Mrs. Shawl, who lived in King William Terrace and had an impediment in her speech, a rare thing in women, and that is not a joke but a medical truth; and Mrs. Shawl had a relation, a Miss Tyler, who lived in Montague Place and had an invalid brother to whom she devoted her life and her energies. He was incurable, yet she had never given up hope; she had taken him to this man and that man without result; his disease was intermittent, it came on him in paroxysms, and in the rests, sometimes of three or four months’ duration, she would sit down by the way-side and take breath before giving the bath chair another push.

She was an optimist. She had once said to her friend, Mrs. Lymington, about Mrs. Lymington’s husband, who had arthritis: “Knock at every door in Harley Street before you give up hope.”

Now this book is about a medical practice as well as a man and I exhibit the foregoing potential fire-cracker, liable to go off, patient setting patient alight, less as a necessary illustration to the story of the man than as a general truth affecting the growth of General Practice in general. All the same, that same night Flynn was knocked up by old Mrs. Shawl.

It would be more correct to say, rung up, and it was Mr. Shawl who did the ringing, an old gentleman in a greatcoat and a muffler, also, incidentally, in a hansom cab, which he kept waiting to take the physician to the patient. Flynn learned in the cab as they drove through the gas-bleak streets of two-o’clock-in-the-morning London, that Mrs. Shawl had always been very delicate in her nerves even before she had been ‘operated upon for hysterectomy,’ and Dr. Townsend said it was thyroid that had a great part to do with it and was most likely hereditary as her mother had suffered from it, being called goitre in those days; Dr. Townsend was dead, and, indeed, they had been practically without a doctor for many a year till this unfortunate seizure had occurred at eight o’clock just as she was having a light supper, just a lightly poached egg with toast, and Miss Neighbour had called him to come up to the bedroom. Miss Neighbour, who was companion to Mrs. Shawl, was a friend of Mrs. Hyslop, whose relative, Mr. Forsyth, had benefited so much from him (Flynn) and she had fortunately written down his address in Harley Street, but Mrs. Shawl demurred from sending for him at that hour and had gone to bed only to awake worse at a little after one. Then the cab drew up in King William Terrace and they got out.

A manservant, who seemed half asleep but fully dressed, was in the hall, and upstairs the doctor was received by Miss Neighbour, a thin woman looking anxious, and conducted to the room of Mrs. Shawl, a sweet old lady sitting up in bed propped with pillows. She wore a bed-jacket fastened with a cameo brooch figuring Leda and a swan and her hands were spread on the coverlet as if in patient resignation.

Flynn liked her at once. He liked nearly all his patients, and that’s why he got on so well with them.

It was the same old story of the urgent night call, with a difference. Mrs. Shawl had always had an impediment in her speech due to a nervous shock in childhood. This had not grown worse, but the extraordinary thing was that just at supper, when she was complaining that the egg was too lightly poached, she suddenly found herself misplacing her aitches, saying, in fact, ‘hegg’ instead of ‘egg.’ Miss Neighbour had laughed and drawn her attention to the matter and she herself had laughed, till, to her alarm and discomfiture, saying the word again she found herself making the same mistake; however, she had put the matter by and composed herself to sleep only to dream that a friend of hers, a Mrs. Hyslop, had fallen out of a window, which upset her so, that waking Miss Neighbour, who slept in the same room, to tell her of the accident, she found herself talking of Mrs. Islop.

All this was told by Miss Neighbour, Mrs. Shawl saying very little.

Then Flynn began to examine the patient. He looked at her tongue, making her put it out and pull it back several times, felt her pulse, examined her pupils, turned her on her face and examined her spine, took her temperature and examined her heart, pricked her with a pin to see if her sensory nerves were all right, and then set her up again in bed. He made her repeat the letter ‘H’ several times by itself and she found she could do it quite well, and when he left the room, giving a guarded but cheerful prognosis and an assurance that he would call in the morning, Miss Neighbour found herself saying tearfully and happily to Mrs. Shawl, “My dear, isn’t he wonderful!”

Yes, the practice was growing, if only by an extra leaf.

Next morning, if he had chosen to review his patients, he would have found himself possessed of three names at least, Mr. Forsyth, Mrs. Shawl, and Mr. Simon, though Simon was more in the nature of a rocket that had shot through the practice than a patient. He never expected to see Simon again except, maybe, armed with an axe. Still, he was in the way of being a patient. So, also, was Pat, who might be thrown in as a makeweight; four patients in all. Mr. Ginnis could scarcely be reckoned, he belonged to Casey.

Altogether, the financial prospects, backed with the blessed four hundred a year accruing from Ireland, were bright and not at all dimmed by the condition of Mrs. Shawl when he called to visit her at eleven o’clock and found her radiant.

The effect of patients upon doctors, unlike the effect of doctors upon patients, has never been written about, but it is as real an effect and maybe as beneficial or disastrous. Some patients are, in effect, like depressing drugs; and they can’t be thrown down the sink; they must be swallowed for the good of the practice.

Mrs. Shawl was not of this order. Relieved somewhat of her H-less fears she said that perhaps it had partly been her fancy, thus putting her finger almost on the spot; but she had been greatly relieved by the medicine, the slight symptoms of sciatica in her left leg that had troubled her in the last few weeks had disappeared.

“I am going to call it your golden mixture,” said Mrs. Shawl, her veined old hand going up to the cameo brooch fastening her bed jacket as if for confirmation of this decision. “You are like Dr. Tyrrel, of Chiswick, when I was a girl, he attended us all as a family, as, indeed, he did for most families in Chiswick. We had almost forgotten his name, we used to call him ‘the healer’ for short as my dear grandmother used to say, but this was in the days when Chiswick was quite small, before the builders spoiled it—Maria, will you go down and get me the little photograph album from the what-not by the piano? I would like to show the doctor our house—yes, it was situated in the Mall and nearby was the house my dear grandmother used to say was put into Vanity Fair by Mr. Thackeray. The house where Miss Sharpe was educated; but London has changed a good deal since then, there were no hansom cabs in those days, and, indeed, my mother remembered the first omnibuses. She said the St. John’s Wood omnibus was painted green and gold, and she would always remember it, for Mr. Calverley, the poet, who was a friend of my father, put it into one of his poems—thank you, Maria, and now will you go down like a good angel and get me Mr. Calverley’s poems, they are on the little bookshelf by the Milton, I wish to show Dr. Flynn what he wrote about that omnibus——”

Twelve o’clock, with the aid of a hansom, found Dr. Flynn in Lancaster Gate—it was a Forsyth day—and Mr. Forsyth, like Mrs. Shawl, was radiant. The Funds had risen a quarter. Brazilian coffee bonds hadn’t risen, they had bounded from two and fourteen-sixteenths to three and an eighth, King Edward’s health (he had been suffering from a slight cold) was established again, and his cook (Forsyth’s), who also did the catering, had discovered by means of a brain-wave and information received from reliable sources that the oysters supplied by Walrus’ in the Queens Road were better and sixpence a dozen cheaper than those supplied by Carpenters’ of Bond Street. Yes, the sun of pleasantness was shining that day on the West End of London, which—though not on the map—included the practice of Dr. Flynn, nor did it sink behind clouds, for at five o’clock arrived a telegram from another apparently satisfied patient.

The question, considering the black draught facts of the case, whether the gentleman might be waiting in armed with a battle axe did not bother Flynn, he was no coward, and a little after six he was at the Albany.

Mr. Simon inhabited the chambers once lived in by Macauley and later by John Oliver Hobbes.

The Albany is the pleasantest cul-de-sac in London and these chambers are perhaps the pleasantest in the Albany, and nothing could have been pleasanter than the reception given by Mr. Simon to his physician. All bothers about the Indian Durbar seemed to have cleared away and of the prayerful attitude nothing remained except, maybe, an extra sobriety of dress and a quietude and kindliness of manner which, if not representative of the attitude one to the other of the Christian Orders, seemed indicative of the common spirit belonging, one might think, to all of them—Christianity.

His tongue was immensely improved, on inspection, and his pulse regular and quiet as the pulse of a sleeping infant.

“And how is Dr. Cherry?” asked the patient after they had talked a little.

“Dr. Cherry is very well, I believe,” replied the other.

“That is well. I have no feelings against Dr. Cherry whatsoever,” said the recipient of this favourable news, “except the natural feelings of those who are misunderstood—you think I am really improving?”

“You certainly are.”

“And I feel so; you understand me.” Then, dropping the subject, he talked of indifferent matters, producing a book of snap-shots he had inflicted on various English cities including Durham, at least, the cathedral. They were nearly all pictures of churches and cathedrals except one which had strayed in, somehow, of a girl bathing without a bathing dress, certainly different from a spire, but he did not seem to see the point and passed on to other things till his man appeared with a silver salver and two decanters.

Flynn did not refuse refreshment, after which his host, looking at his watch, declared that he must have a bite of something to eat before the lecture, and invited the other to come with him to Verreys in Regent Street.

“We need not take a cab,” said he, “it’s only a step.”

Verreys, at that moment, was a cut above the other restaurants, and one might have seen any one in a high way of life dining there from Campbell Bannerman, with the Westminster Gazette propped before him against a decanter, to Mr. Hall Caine dining in company with The Prodigal Son and seeming in some strange way to be enjoying the company. But there were no very illustrious ones to-night and, indeed, the hour was early so they had no difficulty in obtaining a table.

The champagne, Bollinger 89, was good, the whitebait done to a turn, and the calf’s head even better than that to be obtained at the Cavour. There were other wines and things and the company was excellent. That is to say it didn’t talk much. The idea that conversation improves food is, no doubt, a Greek legend rehashed to cover indifferent fish and tasteless entrées, but the remembrance of it did not obtrude itself to-night, nor the remembrance of the Philharmonic meeting, now gone well astern on the ocean of time.

Flynn, who had a good head for liquor, was enjoying himself very much, and it was all part of the practice; an enjoyable practice one might think, contrasting it with the practice being carried on by Dr. Casey at that moment. However, enjoyments have fringes and terminations, and towards half-past ten, or was it a quarter to eleven, this special enjoyment was trailing its fringes and advancing to what seemed a termination in the old Criterion Bar, where the Rev. Mr. Simon (he had grown more and more reverend in speech, attitude, and conduct the drunker he had got) was trying to interest one of the duchesses behind the counter in the financial affairs of the St. Giles’ Home for Fallen Women, with footnotes, suggestive if not explanatory, of the vexed question why women should fall.

Outside, in the street, even the fringes had vanished or were forgotten in the attempt to get the social reformer into a hansom, not helped by his length and instability, or even by suggestions coming from the crowd such as the cutting of him in two or the employment of a pantechnicon.

Still, doctors can’t be choosers, and it was, anyhow, more coloured and exciting than a midwifery case in Rafferty’s Rents.

Back home after midnight, and having deposited his bundle of trouble in the arms of its valet with a promise to call in the morning, he found Biddy, who had been waiting up for him with the news that Margaret had called to say Pat was worse.

“Not exactly worse she made him out to be,” said Biddy, “but not gettin’ along, and could you call and look at him to-morrow.”

“Yes. I’ll call in the morning,” said Flynn.

He was a sound sleeper, but sound sleepers can dream and he dreamed that night that he was in bed with Mrs. Ginnis. This was not a nightmare, it seemed quite natural and proper, considering the fact that Mr. Ginnis was present, not protesting and seated in a chair by the bedside nursing a baby wrapped up in a shawl, also that Margaret was there telling Mrs. Ginnis that tinned salmon was not the natural food for a baby.

However, despite the naturalness of the dream, he awoke somewhat depressed. The dream state and the waking state don’t seem to mix, or do they? Who knows, that we may be waking some day to discover that we have been living in our dreams and dreaming in our lives, and that the two states being equally absurd it doesn’t matter——?

However, as I say, Flynn awoke not to a sense of the absurdity of his life, but to a feeling of vague depression and the remembrance that he had promised to go and see Pat.

Simon was also on his visiting list, and it was a toss-up which of these two desirable patients he would see first.

He determined on Simon. There was also Mrs. Shawl; he would have to fit her in somehow or see her in the afternoon.

The worst of a Harley Street practice, if you are not mainly a consultant, is the visiting list. In Brondesbury, or Twickenham, your patients are in a ring fence, close together like a clump of violets. In the West End it is different, extending as it does from this side of the Park to the other side, from Inverness Terrace to Piccadilly.

He was leaving the house to start on his rounds when the postman arrived, not the early postman but the second postman, for in those days there was a post nearly every hour in London, not to mention a post every Sunday morning.

Flynn received a letter from the postman and read it as he drove to the Albany.

It was from Mrs. Wentworth.

Just a line saying that she had forgotten to tell him that her At Home days were Thursdays, half-past four and ending: “At Home days are stupid things, but one meets people.”

Thinking of the practice—and incidentally of his interests. Or was it incidentally?

To-day was Thursday.

When he arrived at Vigo Street he was in such good spirits that he gave the cabman a shilling above his fare and, when he reached the bedroom to inspect what was left of Mr. Simon, he found that individual up and nearly dressed, and, as though the Wentworth wand had touched him also, no longer in funereal blacks but in a definitely cheerful-looking tweed suit. He was going, he said, to Pangbourne for a blow of fresh air and invited the other to accompany him.

Flynn refused, remembering what the bite of dinner had included, and wondering what this patient must think of a medical practitioner able to leave his practice for half a day’s outing in search of fresh air.

But he did not express this in words, and the other received the negation of the proposal with no sign of resentment. But he refused to put out his tongue.

Ten minutes later, having seen his patient into a cab, the physician came back to the Albany. He wanted to have a word with the servant man.

Smith was that individual’s name and he seemed put out about something. He brought Flynn into a small spare room where a number of hat boxes were stored, all fresh from the hat maker, white cardboard boxes with the maker’s name on them. There were eight. Smith opened one of them and took out a glossy tall hat.

“I went out to the makers in Piccadilly,” said Smith, “and I said what about those tall hats. It was yesterday when Mr. Simon had gone out that they come, and I went round to the makers in Piccadilly, as I was saying, and I said what about those hats you sent round to us, isn’t there some mistake, and they apologized, saying that they hadn’t enough to supply the full order, but they’d sent to the factory and the other four would be despatched early next week.”

Flynn did not laugh. Giving orders that if anything out of the way happened to Mr. Simon’s health either he or Dr. Cherry should be sent for at once, he took his departure and drove to Cunningham Mansions.

Mrs. Wentworth was no longer with him—there was no room for her. Eight tall hats and four more to follow were with him; like eight resident medical officers from Bethlehem Hospital, backed by four consultants from Cavendish Square, they were giving a considered opinion on the case of Mr. Simon!

“General Paralysis of the Insane—First stages.” How was it that Cherry hadn’t spotted it? It was different with himself, for general paralysis is not come across frequently in Endell Street—well there it was, spoiling the day and fulfilling the law, that whatever doctors may inflict on patients is well balanced by what patients can inflict on doctors, and the next patient did not improve matters.

“No sir,” said Margaret, “I didn’t mean to say that he was took worse in particular, only that he isn’t what he ought to be, to my way of thinking—It’s not that he’s been giving trouble only he’s not been giving trouble enough, lying there quiet and seeming wishful not to be disturbed.”

The patient when inspected showed nothing to refute this suggestion, seeming to sleep peacefully, the woolly dog provided for him and costing three and sixpence at Barkers, not neglected, but forgotten for the moment.

There are patients who travel along smoothly on the road of prognosis till, suddenly something interferes with the track or the traveller indicating a possible fault in diagnosis; Mr. Simon was a case in point.

Standing looking at Pat, Flynn felt the twitch at the elbow by which suggestion makes one of her sly advances, and his mind cast back.

The patients he has treated form a library of reference for the doctor of experience. Flynn had treated innumerable children.

No, he didn’t like the look of Pat to-day, not a bit. The last visit had not been very satisfactory; still, children alter from day to day, down to-day and up to-morrow. The bother was Pat hadn’t altered, or very little, and that little was not on the up grade.

He looked very helpless, or would ‘indifferent’ be the better word? Indifferent, anyhow, to his splendid surroundings. “It’s his colour I’m not liking,” said Margaret as she led the way into the next room, “it’s not as good as it was, but maybe I’m only seeing things that aren’t there, for it’s different with childer from grown folk since they aren’t able to tell what they feel and one gets imagining things. I remember Dr. Howe, of Monkstown, saying to Mrs. James Casey, whose youngest son had got the measles coming but hadn’t broke out yet, I remember him saying: ‘Mrs. Casey, I’m not the Almighty to be telling you exactly what’s wrong with him, dealin’ with childer is like dealin’ with dumb animals, seeing they can’t speak and tell their feelin’s; I’m no more than a vetinary surgeon till whatever’s comin’ shows itself. I can only say he’s got the tempiture of a stove and since measles has been in the house it’s maybe measles,’ and sure enough it was.”

“Quite so,” said the other, “well, we’ve just got to wait a bit and watch him, and maybe I’ll get someone else in to see him if he gets any worse—is he taking the milk alright?”

“Oh, yes, he’s taking the milk all right.”

“Have you heard anything of Miss Julia?”

“No, sir, I haven’t heard from her special, only a note from Miss Hancock for me to call round at Gorringe’s and ask about some shoes she’d ordered but hadn’t come—as if she couldn’t have got them in Dublin from Burns or Cannock and White’s, sending trade to England; no wonder Ireland’s poor.”

“Miss Julia’s shoes?”

“No, sir, Miss Hancock’s.”

In Oxford Street near Mudie’s Library there was a most excellent Vienna Café whose coffee and chocolate and éclairs, to say nothing of ices, remain, perhaps, still a dream in your mind if you are over forty. Close to this café there was a flower shop by name of Bolsovers, presided over by a pretty girl whose face was not put to shame by the white roses. Presided seems a heavy word in connection with one who was always flitting about, now amidst the snowdrops (and selling them) of spring and now around the chrysanthemums of autumn, and now—no longer.

Well she was President of the flowers, and they were mostly violets to-day as Flynn passed the shop, having walked from Cunningham Mansions carrying Pat on his back, by way of exercise and making for the Vienna Café to have lunch together.

He paused before the violet shop and went in. There were violets from Cornwall and violets from Nice; bull-headed pale blue Czar violets, and violets from Devonshire recalling Mrs. Wentworth’s eyes.

He bought a big basket full of them, to be dispatched by special messenger, writing down the address.

“And who shall I say they are from, sir?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said he.

The Ancients used to lay offerings at the shrines of protective deities without bothering to leave their cards as well; modern people sometimes do the same.

The café was of a sort that was beginning to spring up in London, but never quite took root. It was not a restaurant—it was a little bit of old Vienna.

The Sandor, before that day he went mad in the Grand Club, might have looked in, striking his boot with his whip, or old Metternich with some of his grand-children, to treat them to cakes.

Flynn, divested for a moment of Pat, was yet not alone. You could not see his companion, but there was nothing mysterious in that fact, for in London no less than in New York the people you see are a small company as against the people unseen.

At Terré’s Tavern more bouillabaisse is served than goes down in the bill, and that old gentleman lunching by himself at Frascati’s can you tell me what people that can never grow old are of his company; what lost lover the companion of that lady having a tête-a-tête interview with her Tête de veaux à la Colbert?

But whoever else might have been sitting at the table where Flynn was seated beside the lady to whom he had sent violets, it was not Cupid.

If you had talked to him of love he would have laughed and said he was too old for that sort of thing (and he only just turned thirty-eight) and who would be bothered with a doctor, and that he’d had enough of love making when he was young. Meaning Mary Anne Collins, of Merrion Square, the daughter of old Collins the stockbroker, who had jilted him (Mary Anne) when he was a student.

It was a really bad jilting, for he had a heart, and it had left him, not a misogynist, for he had a heart, but dull to the other sex on their romantic side. All the same, Mrs. Wentworth’s eyes, it is Mrs. Wentworth I have been talking about all the time, had done their work from the first moment of his meeting them to the moment when, sitting together over the fire, he had given her a headache with his story about Pat.

But this work had been more of a holding than a promising nature, or, if the latter, only promising friendship, sympathy and understanding.

Coming out of the café he found another lady waiting for him, Mrs. Shawl, no less, who told him that understanding, friendship and sympathy were excellent things, but that a practice was a practice and must be attended to, and that he would have plenty of time to see her before his call upon Mrs. Wentworth at four-thirty.

And so it proved, and the medical day beginning with the adventures of Mr. Simon ended about three o’clock with the misadventures of Mrs. Shawl; for the old lady, it seems, had got out of bed during the night to see if there were burglars in the next room, where she kept her old lace and some family heirlooms, and slipped getting back into bed and had fallen, hurting her knee very much, but hadn’t called Miss Neighbour, hoping the pain would pass, and hadn’t telegraphed for him (Flynn) in the morning, being sure he would call as usual.

No radiance to-day; vague disgruntlement—such is the Medical Life.

It was nearly a quarter to five when he arrived at Cambridge Terrace, on the old Irish principle that it looks better to be too late than too early. A brougham was setting down a lady in a picture hat whom he followed in to find quite a number of people, including, after his hostess, who seemed glad to see him, a lady he knew as a member of the Irish Literary Society, Katherine Tynan Hinckson, the poetess, a personality gracious as pleasant.

You met all sorts of people at Mrs. Wentworth’s, some of them were strange enough, yet, strangely enough, nearly all showed the communal property of being pleasant.

In Belgrave Square and Berkeley Square and Park Lane there were hostesses whose nets drew in everything from ambassadors to editors, with often a crowned head tangled in the meshes, to entertainments that left you, if not with your corns trodden on—cold. In Cambridge Terrace it was different.

I think a pleasant hostess draws pleasant guests and makes pleasant ones pleasanter as in the case of Katherine Tynan, which all the same, did not stop her from smothering Flynn to-day with Willy Yeats as a pillow, till hauled off the subject by a long-haired man who looked like a violinist but was a philologist or something like that with an interest in Erse.

To-day you might have picked out of the guests such different people and personalities as Mr. Walker, the editor of the Bayswater Chronicle, and Mr. Sinnett, late editor of the Indian Pioneer. Lady Arnold, wife of the brother of Sir Edwin (Light of Asia Arnold), Harry Bremridge Briggs, a city man yet a translator of Heine and hon. secretary to the Plain Song Society, Maurice Hewlett, pale and rather startled looking as though just escaped from his Masque of Dead Florentines, and “John Strange Winter,” the authoress of Bootle’s Baby.

By chance, to-day, there were no proclaimed animal lovers or anti-so-and-so’s and by chance to-day the crowd was bigger than ordinary, but there were quite enough people for Flynn’s taste and one too many in the form of Mr. Huskisson, an old gentleman with a piebald beard.

“I want you very much to meet Mr. Huskisson,” said the hostess. Then she introduced him and vanished.

Mr. Huskisson was deaf and used an ear trumpet, which seemed sometimes defective; maybe it was only a matter of temperament, for they are temperamental things, or seem so at times, but it really didn’t matter much as conversation with Mr. Huskisson was mostly conducted by Mr. Huskisson. He had a great deal to say, on a lot of things, ranging from the weather to Lord Salisbury and the terrible condition of England from a political viewpoint. Also on the question of London noise and the banging of hansom cab doors at night; which led him to disturbed sleep and the subject of indigestion. Flynn was wondering how it was that Mrs. Wentworth, a kindly and humane woman, had, without any cause given, inflicted all this on him. Now, however, a great white light began to dawn on him, for Mr. Huskisson, abandoning indigestion in the abstract and taking up concrete symptoms such as the twitching up of his feet on going to rest and pain round the heart with acid eructations should he dine later than seven, began to exhibit himself less as a bore than a plant expanding in the light of a medical sun and seeking warmth and sympathy if not free advice.

Not receiving which, he said: “Of course I cannot trouble you with these matters here and now, but as I have no doctor at present and as a friend has very kindly suggested my seeing you and as I find you by an extraordinary coincidence here to-day I would, if you do not think it rude, like to make an appointment to see you.”

“Certainly,” said the other. “This is my card. If you can call on me at twelve to-morrow I shall be glad to go into your case.” He did not ask the name of the person who had recommended him. He was looking at her as she stood saying good-bye to the departing visitors.

This was evidently the reason of the note telling him she was at home on Thursdays. She was thinking of the practice; she had no doubt added another, if dubious, leaf to the growing plant, and, no doubt, thinking of the practice she was in a way thinking of him—still——

He tackled her on the matter before leaving and she laughed screwing up her eyes after the fashion of Du Maurier’s adorable duchess.

Nearly everyone had gone except a philologist and Percy Sinnett and they, having said good-bye, were departing in close argument about some matter Indian maybe or theosophical.

“Sit down,” said she, “for a moment. I know it was a shame of me, but I think he’s a good patient, of course, one can’t be sure but one does one’s best. Tell me, what happened?”

“He’s coming to see me to-morrow.”

“Good.”

“Maybe; anyhow, it was better than good of you to think of me like that. It’s nice to think one has friends.”

Mrs. Wentworth laughed:

“And it’s nice to think I haven’t lost a friend, making you a present like that—what have you been doing since I saw you last?”

“Oh, it’s not what I’ve been doing but what others have been doing,” said he, “an old relative of mine in Ireland has died and left me four hundred a year and I’d scarcely got the news when I come in and find a man saying his prayers on my study carpet; one of Dr. Cherry’s patients; Cherry says I can keep him as he’s more trouble than he’s worth, even though he’s got ten thousand a year; anyhow, he’s another patient—and the same day an old lady rang me up at night to go and see her—at least her husband did the ringing, for he called on me with a cab at two o’clock in the morning. There was nothing wrong with her, only fancy, but sure that’s what keeps most doctors from the workhouse.”

“So the practice is growing.”

“Yes,” said Flynn, “it’s growing.”

“Then what are you worrying about?” asked Mrs. Wentworth. The question startled him. It was as though she knew that he had some special worry on his mind—and how had she guessed it?

“How did you know?” he asked. “Well, I am worried, it’s about that child. It’s not getting on as well as it ought and that’s a fact. I told you the lady I had given it in charge of had gone to Ireland on business, all the same, it’s being looked after all right; everything is being done for it possible and the Irish servant that’s got charge of it couldn’t be better; and, sure, it’s better where it is than where it belonged.”

“Then what are you worrying about?” asked she.

“Faith, I don’t know,” he replied, scarcely knowing himself that it was the picture of Pat lying there and looking, despite the woolly dog and all the comforts that surrounded him, so wisht and lonely and not caring about life, and the thought that, maybe, he was slipping away from it all back into the dark sea that had washed him up on to the chill beach of Endell Street, there to be picked up by a fool of a doctor and carried to the happy and sunlit land of Cunningham Mansions.

Not knowing, or scarcely at all, that maybe his heart was thinking of Pat more than his head.

A man can make himself the father of so many things in this world, other than children got in the ordinary way of business. Mrs. Wentworth sat considering her visitor, who was now for a moment plunged in what seemed a momentary daydream.

Now, you cannot daydream in a lady’s drawing-room, with her sitting on the opposite side of the fireplace waiting for you to wake up, without a bond between you other than the old social bond that draws people together to share one anothers’ bores but never their burdens—unless you are a poet, those licensed dreamers, licensed to dream even in omnibuses.

Maybe, Flynn was a poet and that was why he had put himself into his present position; maybe, she knew it and that was why she had been attracted to him.

Poets exhibit themselves to the intuitive-minded in other ways than by wearing old coats, living in Bloomsbury, forgetting their bills, and expressing themselves in blank prose, calling it verse.

A coal, tumbling out of the grate on to the hearth, broke the little spell.

“Well,” she said as though continuing a conversation, “you have done your best all round and no one can do more than that. If you are not satisfied or if you think it would be of any help why not call in a children’s specialist—Dr. Cheadle, for instance.”

“I’ve heard of him,” said Flynn.

“And I have known of cases he has attended,” said she. “One child, especially, he simply saved its life. Seems to me that doctoring children is like doctoring animals—young children, anyhow; they can’t talk and tell where the pain is and so on. I expect it’s the same with veterinary surgeons, they have to work by instinct.”

“I’ll get hold of him to-morrow,” he said, “and arrange for a consultation.”

“I expect you’ll find him pretty expensive.”

He laughed. “Well, if he is I’ll find the money. It will be paying my share; she’s done whatever paying has had to be done up to this, though it’s not been very much.” He had never mentioned Julia Corkran’s name to Mrs. Wentworth, nor that lady made any enquiries as to the other’s personality, though interested of course, no doubt.

They sat for a little longer talking about nothing much and then he took his departure, promising to let her know the result of the consultation, and carrying with him a trace of warmth, other than the warmth of the fire, and a trace of perfume; the scent of violets, furs, not yet put into summer storage, and china tea. A pleasant memory unspoiled even by Mr. Huskisson and his ear trumpet and the knowledge that Mr. Huskisson and Co. would have to be attended to to-morrow.

A deaf man suffering from a grouse against the Government and what seemed to be a recondite form of dyspepsia.

Mrs. Wentworth was right.

A children’s doctor and a veterinary surgeon have bonds of relationship not recognized by the General Medical Council. The ‘Question’ is the real sounding line of medical practice. The thermometer can tell you the temperature of the afflicted one but it cannot tell where the pain is. A whole lot of things cannot be told except by word of mouth, and as children below a certain age have, like horses, no mouths to speak with, the vet. and the child’s doctor have to navigate chiefly by guess and by God—that is to say, pretty much by instinct.

This form of navigation is more than an art, it is a possession.

The two greatest veterinary doctors in the days of Flynn were Loeffler and Mr. Dollar; the greatest child doctor was Dr. Cheadle.

He was a St. Mary’s man.

A large old gentleman with a clean-shaven, kindly, archiepiscopal face, children took to him at once. Children know a good person by instinct. I never believe the story of Red Riding Hood, she would have known.

Anyhow, children knew and accepted Dr. Cheadle, and none the less readily because of his watch chain. A huge silver watch chain it was, fishing up, when required, a great gold watch with a hand that went hopping round as well as the other hands that were far less lively in their movement.

Perhaps it was the watch that was the real attraction, but I don’t think so.

Flynn called on him at eleven o’clock the next morning after his interview with Mrs. Wentworth to arrange for a consultation. It was Friday and an off-day at the hospital so that the good man was not overcrowded with work, and the consultation was arranged for at five o’clock that afternoon at Cunningham Mansions.

“It’s a child that has been adopted by a patient of mine who has been called to Ireland on business,” explained Flynn, “and I am looking after it for her, and as she has commissioned me to meet all expenses I will give you my cheque for the fee.”

“That will be all right,” said the other, “quite all right; at five o’clock then.”

A children’s doctor requires to have some knowledge of parents as well as children; in fact, he sometimes finds that the real disease afflicting the child is the parent, or parents, as the case may be.

Failing parents as an introductory medium in the present case, Dr. Cheadle had to fall back on Flynn, and he could not hide from himself that there was something vaguely out of the common in the business. However, he was used to the world, and wrote down the appointment in his visiting list whilst the other took himself off home to meet Mr. Huskisson, who arrived as per appointment precisely at the hour of twelve.

Now, amongst the finer arts of your Harley Street and Wimpole Street doctor must be counted the art of dismissing a patient without giving offence. The art of saying without speech: “There is your prescription, my dear man, and I have told you what your diet should be and now kindly take your departure for I have other patients to see.”

Flynn found Mr. Huskisson difficult to get rid of. It wasn’t so much that the gentleman had brought with him letters from his late wife to illustrate the manner in which she had urged him to whole-meal bread and to avoid the calcium salts which Dr. Probyn had recommended him to take with the yolk of an egg beaten up in soda water twice a day. It was not so much all this as the difficulty of detaching him from his main subject—himself.

“A sick man’s disease is often himself.” These words ought to be hung up in every consulting-room of the West End.

It is different in the East End. There the heavily burdened people are content to come along to the doctor bringing their belly aches and other troubles without piling themselves on top of it all. They have not time to introspect, retrospect, future-inspect or inspect.

In the East End the patients are mainly people, in the West End they are mainly selves. Perhaps Flynn was beginning to feel this when he sat down to luncheon that day and that was why he nearly grumbled at the under-cooked condition of the chop served up to him by Biddy, and his mood was not much better when he went up to Cherry’s rooms that night on the chance of finding him in.

“Oh, my dear chap,” said Cherry when he caught sight of the other. “You’ve let me in—cock yourself in that chair—How? ask Mrs. Crow-Martin, otherwise known as the woman with the teeth, otherwise known as long Simon’s sister——”

“Simon’s sister——!”

“Yes, the sister of Simon who left me for you. His manservant told her a strange doctor had called on him and taken him out to dinner and brought him back hopeless and called on him again next morning——”

“Wait a moment,” said Flynn. Then he told of the dinner episode and his call the morning after and about the tall hats.

“Yes,” said Cherry, “it looks like general paralysis, doesn’t it—I wonder why it is that it runs so often to tall hats. Well, anyhow, up to a little while ago when he left me it was mostly just instability of conduct and doing funny things, such as soliciting people to pray with him for the state of the Holy Roman Catholic Church; nothing certifiable. You see he’s so well-off it would be a dangerous thing to put one’s hand to a certificate, but it’s different now, I think—tell me where did he say he was going when you parted with him yesterday morning?”

“Putney—I think it was——”

“Well, he didn’t go there. He met a barrel organ-grinder in Piccadilly and hired his organ for a sovereign and took it along and played it before Buckingham Palace. It would have been all right only he refused to go away and he resisted going to Vine Street.

“The Crow-Martin woman sent rushing for me and she also sent for Hacksmith, and as the iron was hot we struck, getting old Deacon, the magistrate, to make the bonds legal. Simon is at this present moment in Camberwell House. I’m sorry to have robbed you of a patient,” finished Cherry with a grin.

It seemed a good loss, everything considered; yet, it was as though one of the first fruits produced by the growing practice had fallen off, and fallen off with a thud.

“It’s maybe been hinting of itself for a good while past,” went on Cherry, “and that’s perhaps why he wanted to get rid of me, and the sight of you completed the business—I’m not wanting to be rude, but he, no doubt, thought to himself (if you can call it thinking, not instinct) here’s a nice green medical man to play about with. Clever! There’s more cleverness in Camberwell House than there is in the House of Commons, only it’s not organized and harnessed to political graft. Let’s forget him—what else have you been doing with yourself, for you don’t look any too bright this evening?”

The other told about Pat and Dr. Cheadle’s visit to him. “And the bother is,” he finished, “he wouldn’t say anything much; only gave the hint that tabes mesenterica might be developing. I could see quite plain he didn’t think much of him; but he wouldn’t commit himself—I don’t know, but it seems to me a consultant called in to see a patient is handicapped; he hasn’t been following the case and can only judge by what he sees at the moment.”

“Yes,” said the other, getting up and opening the tantalus case on the side table where a tray with glasses was set out, “and judging by what I can see at the moment I’m going, as a consultant, to prescribe for you. Say when—there, stick that into you. Have you had dinner?—good, then you can smoke, and here’s a Ramon Alonez. Did you tell old Cheadle the history of the case—I mean about the mother and all that?—well, perhaps it was just as well not, it wouldn’t help in the diagnosis—and as to that girl who has gone off to Ireland, why shouldn’t she? My dear man, you can’t make a mother of a girl by putting a child in her lap. Oh, Lord! the rubbish I’ve heard talked about mother love, as if it was a virtue; it’s only an insurance policy taken out by nature for everything that’s born, whether it’s a snake or a human, and it’s only a mother that can keep up the policy. There is no such thing as foster-mother love—at least, very little of it.”

“Faith,” said the other, “I half believe you.”

It was three days later, on a Monday, that Miss Hancock came to Town, arriving in the early morning by the Irish Mail and in a temper. She generally travelled like that; little things annoyed her if they did not give her pleasure, and the traveller encounters a lot of little things between Kingstown Harbour and Euston Station, not all of them pleasure giving.

Having transferred herself, a fur travelling rug and a crocodile skin suit case into a four-wheeler, she drove to Cunningham Mansions where Margaret, warned of her coming, was expecting her.

The drive in the four-wheeler, smelling of damp straw and driven by a cabman inclined to be blasphemous over a debated sixpence, had not improved the lady’s temper. However she showed nothing of this to Margaret.

Margaret was not a person to match tempers with.

Nor, as she sat down to the breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, marmalade and tea prepared for her, did she give the reason of her sudden journey to London.

The question of the child, and the fact that he was not getting on very well and had been seen by another doctor did not seem to interest her much, or only in relation to Dr. Flynn and how he was doing in his new practice.

“Fine, I believe,” said Margaret.

“Well, he’s got me to thank,” said the other, “for getting him out of that hole of a place where he was and into decent surroundings; seems to me I spend half my life getting people out of holes and trying to make them see their surroundings in the light of sense—no, I won’t be back for luncheon so you need get nothing in, and a chop will do for dinner.”

At ten o’clock she went out and, picking up a hansom, drove to Harley Street.

James admitted her and said that Dr. Flynn was in.

She looked around her with approbation at the waiting-room, and scarcely had she taken her seat when James reappeared to show her into the consulting-room.

“Well, this is different from the other place,” said she after they had exchanged greetings, “and Margaret tells me you are doing fine. I knew you would. I told you that myself and I told my niece.” Miss Hancock rearranged herself comfortably in her chair and took stock of the furniture and fittings with evident approval. “Anyhow,” she went on, “you have got the place very different from what Dr. Parsloe had it. I remember calling on him once—not as a social visit but to ask after a friend of ours who was his patient, and it was like sitting waiting for the Day of Judgment in that old front room of his. However,” said Miss Hancock, “I haven’t come all the way from Ireland to tell you all this, but to have a talk with you on something desperately important to do with my niece.”

“Yes?” said Flynn.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” she went on dropping to a mournful and retrospective tone, “why they quarrelled or what it was all about—I’m talking of the young man she was engaged to several years ago, but they did and it was a pity for he was of quite a good family and very straight-living, and I believe it was that that made her go in for dogs and take up the way she was living, as if her back was broken, on a sofa, till this money business took her over to Ireland and they meet again.”

“Yes,” said Flynn taking his seat behind his desk as though she were a patient telling her symptoms. “So she met him again.”

“T’cha!” said the other, “it wasn’t a question of her meeting him but of him meeting her. It was the money brought him back creeping round her. I told her so straight and I might just as well have been talking to a blank wall—or a mule. She’s so sure of herself, that’s what makes her so irritating; I’ve often noticed selfish people are like that. Well, there it is, and maybe it’s for the best, for, as I said, he’s a straight-living young fellow and won’t throw her money away—not that she’d let him—and he’s a gentleman; a good old family and no drunkards amongst them—yes, looking at it all round it’s maybe all for the best, and anyhow, it will be a mercy to have her settled.”

She paused for a moment and seemed engaged in inward contemplation whilst the other though flattered, perhaps, by being made the confidant of these family affairs wondered vaguely what the matter of desperate importance might be.

“There’s only one thing in the way,” she went on, “and it’s got to be put right somehow—it’s that awful child.”

“You mean——”

“I mean that child. I don’t think,” said Miss Hancock speaking with emphasis and deliberation, “I don’t think I was ever so taken aback as on that first day when I came to hear about it—but that’s nothing to this. Of course, nobody knows about it, but all the same, it’s a thing that may poke its head out at any moment and if he knew——”

“Lord save us,” cried Flynn. “Why shouldn’t he know, there’s nothing in it—why shouldn’t everyone know?”

“There’s no reason at all why everyone shouldn’t know,” said she, “the bother is they don’t—it’s all this hushing and hiding of the thing that may do the mischief if it gets out.”

“And who did the hushing and hiding but yourself?”

“Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t, that doesn’t alter the position; and you know what venomous tongues are; and why doesn’t she tell him, you say, can’t you see a girl saying to a young man ‘I must tell you something; I’ve adopted a baby; it’s my servant’s sister’s child,’ and the rest of it.”

“But she needn’t say she’d adopted it. I thought we’d arranged it clear enough that Margaret was looking after it; that she was responsible, and that it had only been given a home in a flat for her to be able to look after it, wasn’t that clear?”

“As clear as crystal, as clear as the fact that if we don’t want to have all sorts of trouble, Margaret has got to take her sister’s child somewhere else; if Julia had given the thing a temporary home whilst she was arranging something else for it, matters would have been different, as things are, they aren’t.”

“Did Miss Corkran send you to me to say all this?”

“I am not a person to be sent on messages,” replied Miss Hancock. “She did not. I came on my own initiative. We had a talk till two in the morning of the night before last, and I made her see reason. Julia, despite her whims and fancies, is a good-hearted girl, and though the thing kept her awake for nights and nights with it’s temper and crying, she did not want to part with it. She said she was really fond of it and will always take an interest in it.”

“I see.”

“I thought you would. It’s only a matter of common sense. The great thing is to get it somewhere else; it doesn’t matter where so long as it’s out of the flat; suppose one of his relatives or one of these London people come to call and hear it yelling—you know what I mean.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “it’s plain enough, it’s got to go somewhere, into the workhouse or the Thames it doesn’t matter so long as its out of the flat.”

“I don’t think that’s the tone to take,” said she, “considering that it was you who did all the mischief. I knew you did it for the best, as you thought; but you see how it has turned out.”

“Maybe you are right,” said he playing with a paper weight on the desk before him, turning it about and seeming to examine it from all points of view. “Maybe you are right, and the only thing to do is get it away from there.”

“I’m glad you see that—and you’ll understand won’t you that I’m so anxious about it that I’d like to be sure it’s gone before I return to Ireland.”

Flynn looked at her.

“When are you going back?”

“I’d like to go to-morrow if I can.”

“Well, you can go,” said he. “I’ll get it away to-day.”

Miss Hancock looked relieved.

“I’m glad you see the matter like that,” she said. “I felt you would. Where do you think you will be able to place it?”

“In the workhouse, if I can’t get somewhere else,” said he rising from his chair, and then he bowed her out with the most absolute politeness. All the same, when in the street Miss Hancock had the feeling, apart from the bruises, as of a person who had been kicked out. Not that she minded much, she had gained her point.

He had accompanied her to the front door. Returning, he went to the head of the kitchen stairs and shouted for Biddy. “And what ails you at all?” asked Biddy her hands all flour with the suddenness and tone of the call and her sleeves rolled up, as she followed him into the consulting-room.

“Nothing with me only we’ve got to get the spare room ready at once.”

“Glory be to God!” cried the other, “and what for?”

Flynn told.

“But you can’t,” said Biddy, “how are you to bring it here and who’s to nurse it, I’m up to me eyes in the kitchen and James no good, unless you nurse it yourself. I knew something would be happening when Margaret tould me that ould turkey cock of a Hancock woman——”

“No matter about that,” said Flynn. “It can’t be helped. It’s maybe my own fault, but there we are and something has got to be done. Margaret can bring it here and stay for a few hours till it’s settled in and I’ll go round to the St. Botolph’s Mission (he was a Roman Catholic) and see the Mother Superior and get hold of a nursing sister to come round and look after it in the day time.”

“And what about nights?” asked the other.

“Well, we’ll have to fix that,” said he. “Maybe the sister could come as a whole time job; if not, the spare room is close to mine and I could hear it if it shouted; and it’s of no bother at nights now. I’d be more satisfied about it if it was.”

Biddy did not debate this point; the pie crust she had left unfinished in the kitchen was doing the debating with the party of the second part—the spare room, and the getting ready of it. It’s true there wasn’t much to be done in this way. It was a light and cheerful little room, at least as bright and cheerful as a Harley Street room can be. Dr. Parsloe had used it as a bedroom for his one and only daughter, a cheerful child who had died of scarlatina at the age of six. That was over a year ago, and James had told Biddy all about it and about the funeral and the grief of Dr. Parsloe. James was a ghoul in this respect, but, all the same, a ghoul with finer feelings, for he had a bright recollection of the prettiness of little Mary Parsloe with her golden curls, “Made the place seem different,” said he, “and if I look into that room of hers,” said he, “I seem to see her as I saw her las’ in her white muslin dress and blue sash.”

This information, derived from James, had always made the little room, together with its natural brightness, a brighter place for Biddy, for, tell it not in Gath, as against Endell Street, the Harley Street house figured in her imagination as a “dull ould hole.”

All the wealthy patients that had passed through its consulting-rooms had left no gold behind them in the way of memories, though plenty in the way of metal.

“Well,” said Biddy held for a moment between the thought of the pastry in the kitchen and this new thing sprung on her and suddenly breaking silence, “I’ll do me endeavours; there’s no dustin’ to be done for it’s done and the room’s aired and all, for the sun gets into it and you’d better have Margaret come along with it and see it settled and bring what it wants with her—and now I must be runnin’ off to the kitchen or me pastry will be ruined; and luncheon is at wan sharp for I’ve got a sweetbread for you and it won’t keep.”

Down in the kitchen she attacked the pastry with the rolling pin and an energy that spoke of a mind astray; astray maybe but not unoccupied by thought not entirely unpleasant.

It would be one over Margaret, anyhow.

No. 10A Harley Street had many good qualities; the rooms were fairly lofty, the drainage was good, the street was quiet, High Respectability sat in the hall to welcome patients in—but it was not a family house.

The same may be said of many of the houses round about, including the unhappy-family house of the Barretts of Wimpole Street. Love and light and youth and laughter may be found, no doubt, in the district by searching for them, but they do not parade themselves.

One can understand James’ meaning when he said that little Mary Parsloe had made the place seem different, but not his attitude, at first, towards Pat.

The bother was he hadn’t been told of the matter, there had been no time; Flynn had rushed off like a rocket on the removal business, Biddy was busy in the kitchen, and a ring coming he opened the hall door to find a placid-faced lady in black from the St. Botolph’s Mission standing on the steps. She had a doubtful looking bag in her hand and the four-wheeler that had brought her was driving off, the driver growling over the exactitude of the fare he had received. They cut things fine at St. Botolph’s.

“What do you want?” asked James, knowing this to be no patient, suspecting it to be a charitable request affair, but doubtful, owing to the cab aspect of the matter.

“I have come to look after the child,” said she.

“Well,” said he civilly enough, “I am afraid you have made a mistake. There is no child here.”

“But this is Dr. Flynn’s, is it not?”

James admitted the fact.

“Then I will come in and wait for Dr. Flynn,” said she placidly moving in to find Biddy brought up from the kitchen by some miracle of instinct.

Biddy did the explaining to James. All the same the affair left a sore spot that only time could remove, which it did in the course of a few days and under the influence of the many interests stirred to life by the newcomer.

James, as perhaps I have already hinted, was one of those people who take an interest in the affairs and doings of other people. The door keepers of the human zoo, by which I mean the hall porters of the clubs, hotels, restaurants, business houses, and so forth are, in the main, possessed of this interest, either through instinct or acquirement; and not only the door keepers but the attendants that wait on the animals.

It was instinct in the case of James, sharpened by experiences in hotels and not blunted by experiences in Harley Street.

After a few days Pat took hold of James as an object worthy of attention other than disgustful.

Biddy had explained that the thing was an orphan, picked up by the doctor to be ‘saved from the street or worse,’ and James had listened, the left eye of his mind gently closing; but he said nothing.

His awful knowledge of life might have led him to ask questions, only for the fact that his interest in people did not extend to babies; their past did not intrigue him at all and they had no characters, never gave tips, never got drunk or swindled people, never ran off with each other’s wives. The interests created by Pat had nothing to do with social affairs, it was more of an animal nature and might be likened to the interest created by a pup. James, leaving aside Mary Parsloe, had little knowledge of children, all the same the knowledge given him by Mary did not tend to make them unattractive, and after a few days he would be having a look in at the spare bedroom to see if anything was required by Sister Louise, if she were there, or just a look in for the sake of a look in.

Keep a mongoose from sticking its nose from where it isn’t specially wanted!

Biddy was always having a look in at odd and sundry times; she had arranged to make up a bed for herself in the spare room so that the sister was only required by day, and Margaret would arrive generally in the evening for a glass of stout and a talk with Biddy to see how thing’s were going on.

Between James and Biddy and the good sister and Margaret, to say nothing of Flynn, Pat was well attended.

He had succeeded without effort in making himself something in the world. The something that nearly every member of upper class London, literary or aristocratic, was striving to become—an object of interest.

Even Cherry had a look in on him now and then. His interest was not of the highest nature; it was as though Flynn had started to keep chickens in the little strip of backyard and he wanted to see how they were doing; with no eye on possible eggs, but just to see how they were doing.

He considered the whole thing clearly ‘bug-house,’ to use a delightful American expression just then beginning to seep into England. Of course, he knew the main facts of the position, still, he thought Flynn might have made some sort of other arrangements; put the thing out to nurse or into a home of some kind; returning it with apologies to its mother he saw would be impossible; leaving aside the mother’s social and alcoholic position, her reactions might rock London if Fleet Street got a hold of the tale, involving, amongst others, the girl on whom the thing had been planted.

All that was clear, yet he thought that Flynn might have done otherwise, forgetting that it was Flynn.

And if Flynn had done otherwise he would have been denied the knowledge that what he had done in this matter particular was for the best.

The move from Cunningham Mansions had marked an improvement in the patient’s condition. Why, who can say? Every man, every woman, and every child—aye and every plant, is surrounded by a viewless atmosphere from which vitality is drawn as surely as from food. One greenhouse seems as good as another greenhouse—ask the plant. One house as good as another house—ask the person. One nurse may seem as good as another nurse—ask the child.

Anyhow, within a fortnight of the move the child, Pat, had improved; the woolly dog was no longer a matter of indifference, food had become a matter of interest—no use in asking him why, he was still on the other side of speech; maybe a bit backward, but not from dullness of mind, to judge from his reactions and his interest in people and surroundings; the squalling at night, which might have had to do with the cutting of his lateral incisors, was not resumed; perhaps they had done cutting themselves (the incisors), anyhow, he slept.

The joke that tickles a baby most is the top of a forefinger tickling its ribs. He responded to this form of humour and had what seemed pleasurable reflective fits when his eyes would wander about the room as though following some thing or person that he liked.

“As though there was another child in the room,” said the good sister, judging the height and age of the unseen one by the level of the watcher’s gaze.

Young children, like dogs and cats, seem sometimes to see things they can’t tell about; maybe it’s forbidden. Maybe it was little Mary Parsloe playing with her dolls or what not that attracted his amused and half bemused attention; so many extraordinary things are possible in this extraordinary world that what is impossible—one can’t tell.

It was about the third week after the advent of Pat that Mrs. Shawl broke down, not after the fashion of a motor car or a horse, but of a patient.

If patients could be separated from their diseases so that each might be treated separately, medicine would be a simpler and certainly a more satisfactory business.

Mrs. Shawl, considering that she had nothing much the matter with her, was getting on well; she had taken the medicine as directed three times a day, the pill, with nothing in it, every second night, and syrup of figs to keep her inside working; with her petrol tank charged with the best and lightest of ailments she seemed fit to run a long distance without a serious breakdown.

And then one morning Flynn found a note from Miss Neighbour, on old-fashioned paper and sealed with a green seal representing a dove, saying that Mrs. Shawl was so much better that she did not think Dr. Flynn need call again and that if she wanted him she would let him know.

The truth being that Miss Neighbour in idle gossip with one of the Forsyth crowd had discovered that Dr. Flynn was a Roman Catholic!

Forsyth knew it through conversation with Flynn, but Forsyth did not care, being pretty much an atheist though with a family pew in St. Barnabas, but to Mrs. Shawl the news came as a shock.

She dated from a not distant day when ‘No Popery’ placards might have been seen in London, the word ‘Papist’ for her mind covered, without concealing or condoning, a great many sins, she was a niece of that Canon Shawl who had conducted the crusade against incense.

If you can imagine the feelings of an old and respectable sheep who finds that she had been doctored by a goat you can imagine the feelings of Mrs. Shawl.

Of course, Flynn knew nothing of all this, but he felt the snub. Felt it worse, perhaps, than if he had known the truth.

They had been so friendly. He had promised to bring her some photographs of Irish scenery on his next visit to show her what Ireland was really like; now there was to be no next visit. His warm heart was chilled as though a cold hand had been laid upon it, the hand of indifference, than which nothing can be colder.

Nothing like this had ever happened to him in Endell Street, if it had he would most likely have gone round to whoever it was and said: “What’s the matter with you, or is it crazy you’ve gone; or is it the last medicine didn’t suit you—or what?” But not here.

In Endell Street a bother could always be smothered with work; but not here. Even had there been enough patients he could not have fancied himself finding surcease from worry amidst Forsyths and Huskissons and others of the West End tribe.

Fortunately, that day Mrs. Wentworth called. She called by express invitation issued the day before to see Pat and how well he was getting on, and at the same time to have a cup of tea.

Pat was on show like a chrysanthemum grown under difficulties or, leaving flowers for animals, a pup over the distemper. There is, perhaps, no human pride so pure as the pride in the human heart over growing things, and no admiration so healthy as the admiration of a woman for a wholesome and happy looking baby.

There was great admiration on the part of Mrs. Wentworth followed by tea, over which the case of Mrs. Shawl came up for discussion. She had sensed the fact that there was something not quite right with him.

Away at the back of her mind there had been for some time the shadow of a doubt as to this venture in which he had engaged and his fitness for it. A willing helper and stoker—had she not with forethought and planning supplied Huskisson as a log to keep the fires burning—all the same she had still, at the back of her mind, as I have said, a doubt as to his fitness for strife with the social worries, vexations, conventional obstructions, and cold baths incident to the business he had undertaken. She knew her world.

He showed her the letter and she read it and gave it back to him with a little laugh.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” said she. “It’s possible she’ll send flying for you in the middle of the night if she finds she’s dropping her H’s again and then you can heap coals of fire on her head by going and being nice to her. I know, heaping coals of fire on old ladies is not a man’s business, at least, it oughtn’t to be part of a man’s business, nor avoiding pin pricks or pretending not to mind them; but a medical man practicing in this part of the town must expect to come across all sorts of pettiness, to say nothing of bad manners. I do a bit of social work in the Notting Hill district and I’ve always found the manners of the poor a lot better than the manners of the so-called rich. I mean the manners that come from the heart, not the head. I expect you found that in your other practice.”

Cherry’s reaction was different when he heard that night about the Shawl defection.

“The old bitch wants kicking,” said he, and he meant it and that meant a lot, for it was a certificate of his interest in Flynn.

It was also an indication of Flynn’s power of awakening interest in himself and his affairs, other than speculative. A kindly interest.

Cherry, like Mrs. Wentworth, was not at all assured in his mind as to the prospects of this new practitioner in his new setting. He thought he might get on all right and then, again, he thought he mightn’t. He was a good sort and evidently pretty well up in his work, but there was just one doubtful spot in his character—his likeability.

Not the sort of likeability that appeals to the crowd and makes for popularity, but the more subtle and sincere form that springs from a heart destitute of guile.

Not the sort of heart to fight the world within Harley Street, unless you are a heart specialist with the world at your feet like Mackenzie.

Even though your wealth is that of the Bank of England, even though you may be a beggar with nothing to lose, it is pleasant to come across a man that you know to be incapable of swindling you.

Flynn was that sort of man to those who could judge character and a man like that, if you can find him, is a possession. You don’t want him injured in any way; and you don’t want to see him injuring himself; and goodness knows as far as the latter went, the Pat incident was simply a certificate of efficiency.

Oscar Wilde, speaking of a certain person, said that he had come to London to found a salon and had only succeeded in founding a restaurant.

Cherry was beginning to feel that our friend Flynn had founded a nursery, anyhow, even though he should fail in founding a practice—but that wasn’t the way to prosperity. That Flynn was taking a deep interest in the business was a fact that did not improve matters; it was plain that he had come to feel for the thing.

To anyone not knowing the true facts of the case all this business might seem slightly strange.

‘It only wants a perambulator and him wheeling it up and down Harley Street without a wife at his back,’ thought Cherry. But he said nothing. Switching the conversation to the present condition of Mr. Simon safe now and apparently happy in Camberwell House.

“Anyhow,” said he, “he’s better there than playing barrel organs in front of Buckingham Palace this cold weather; my dear chap, if you are worried about the vagaries of old women in your practice think of me and my troupe of performing hyenas, dressed up to look like humans but always ready to bite; and if they aren’t, their relatives are; and it’s not what they do so much as the sudden way they have of doing things—and it’s not only them but the Commissioners in Lunacy; always on your back and putting their fingers in the pie. I certified such a nice old chap, he was a retired stockbroker or banker or something, looked as if he’d be the life and soul of a Christmas party; used to collect china and then took it into his head to collect butchers’ knives; for that and some other reasons I certified him and got him into Bradstock House, and a few months later along come the Commissioners and said he was sane. He came out like a hornet, threatening me and Chalmers, the other chap that had done the certifying. Ten thousand pounds damages was what he wanted, and his old wife, who had helped us to get him into the asylum, backed him; and maybe he’d have got it, only one morning before the action came on he called to his wife to come into his dressing-room where he was shaving. ‘Come here, Maria,’ said he, ‘I want to show you something,’ and in the old fool came and he cut her throat from ear to ear. She wasn’t able to give evidence at the trial, but she might have been. So just think of that next time you get depressed with the antics of your patients.”

A cheerful little story to be going on with.

“Yes, indeed, delighted, will expect you here at half-past ten,” was the telegraphed reply of Flynn, supplemented by a short note to the same effect.

The weather that had been chilly of late had turned warmer, and on the morning of the expedition spring seemed to have definitely arrived to judge by the sky over Victoria Station.

Mrs. Wentworth had called for him in her brougham (hired from Longley’s in Westbourne Mews), so there was no contention as to who should pay the cab fare; but she was firm on the subject of paying her own railway fare, so he let the matter go.

They had a first-class carriage to themselves; he had bought her several illustrated papers, and as she sat glancing over them and as the train drew away leaving behind it mean streets and dreadful suburbs an extraordinary feeling of relief came to the mind of Flynn.

It was the feeling of getting away from London; from Harley Street, Endell Street, Oxford Street; from Forsyths, Huskissons, Shawls; from problems and perplexities and people he didn’t understand and people he understood too well—from London.

It was, in fact, the first free-hearted bit of holiday he had come on since he didn’t know when.

He could have taken holidays, no doubt; packed a bag and gone off leaving a locum tenens in charge, nothing was easier. But whether in Endell Street, Harley Street or elsewhere never had such a thing occurred to him. For one thing he had no one to go with, for another his light-hearted and kindly spirit was harnessed and hitched to the habit of work.

Self-imposed work is quite a different thing from work imposed on one, more subduing and subtly tyrannical so you will sometimes see a solicitor or business man holding to his office whilst his clerk takes holiday—or would have seen in the days I am writing about.

This keep your nose to the grindstone habit or instinct might have been broken by a friend and companion—well it was so broken to-day.

When you get out of the train at Rookhurst you step into a silence—if there are no milkcans being collected—broken by the murmur of bees in summer and the calling of lambs in spring. Outside the station gate Dr. James Anthony Forbes’ old horse was harnessed to the trap that was waiting for them.

Outside station gate or patient’s house you will never see a thing like that again for the motor car has changed no world more completely than the world of country medical practice. Nor will you ever see another doctor just like Dr. James Anthony Forbes, member of the college of Surgeons and Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries; yet, in the first years of the reign of King Edward, of blessed memory, he was a completely possible figure. Dating from times beyond Paget and Timothy Holmes—he was over eighty—this gentleman, who had dropped his morning patients in honour of his visitors, and was in his garden, a spud in his hand, doing little jobs. He was rubicund of face and might have looked like a bishop if he had been dressed properly. There were beehives in the garden, there were snowdrops, and later on, there would be a glory of roses; the house was straw thatched and did not look unlike a beehive. There was a magpie in a wicker cage hanging in the porch. There was Peace and what seemed Contentment.

“I have brought my friend Dr. Flynn with me to see what a real country practice is like,” said Mrs. Wentworth, never a word about the influenza, artful woman that she was. “A real old-fashioned country practice,” she went on as they passed into the hall off which on the left an open door showed a comfortable little dining room with the cloth laid for luncheon and a sunbeam illuminating a big glass jug of cyder.

“Who told you I was wanting to sell it?” asked the owner of the real old-fashioned country practice in a voice as though he were shouting to someone at the top of the stairs. He was a bit deaf, was Dr. Forbes, but you daren’t tell him so; “Oh, I know, it was Maria, there’s nothing like a sister for chattering—and I’m not sure yet I want to. There, run upstairs if you want to put your hat straight; you know the way, but mind the step outside the lavatory door——” Then to Flynn, “Here’s the surgery.”

He led the way into the surgery, a pleasant room with latticed windows, shelves and shelves of bottles and a big table in the middle littered with vaccination papers, the Parish book, pens, ink and paper and a blue porcelain dish with some apples in it; the last of last year’s crop.

There was also an old lady in the surgery, seated on a chair and with a basket beside her from which the head of a dead rabbit protruded. When she saw the doctor she pulled up her skirt revealing a leg bandaged to the knee and began to unwind the bandage, talking all the time, the physician asking her where she had stolen the rabbit and she replying in kind, till, jesting apart, the object of her visit was unveiled. An ulcer, which was worth literally pounds to her in the way of extra relief from the guardians. The doctor looked at it critically, said it didn’t seem to be improving, received the information that she had received a letter from her boy Jim who was at sea, gave her a little pot of zinc ointment and a message for her boy Jim to keep clear of the girls, also an apple from the plate.

A kindly interview which pleased Flynn, somehow.

“Oh, the Parish patients aren’t worth much,” said the dispenser of apples as she went off with injunctions to keep that leg resting if she didn’t want to be in her coffin before summer. “They don’t bring in more than a hundred a year, but there aren’t many of them; it’s the villagers and farmers make up most of the practice, simple people but they pay regularly and they’re easy to get on with. I reckon I take six to seven hundred a year after deducting drug charges and income-tax—but it’s a dull life, after forty years of it. The best thing about it is the people; they are simple folk and that’s always the easiest to get on with.”

Flynn agreed.

“Do you know Hove?” asked the other and then, without waiting for a reply, went into a description of the beauties of Hove and its desirability as a place of residence.

Maria (evidently the sister) lived there and she was always wanting him to join her and share her house whenever he retired from active practice. Influenza! rubbish! he had been suffering from nothing but a cold; that was Maria all over, she had got influenza on the brain and must have told Vicky (evidently Mrs. Wentworth).

The luncheon bell cut him short and during the meal, served by a fresh-faced and healthy looking country girl, Flynn could not help wondering what the delights of Hove might be, able, as they were, to attract his host from all this; the pleasant room, the pleasant house, the quiet arising from simplicity and the evidently pleasant people; and inspection of the garden and stables after luncheon and tea, later on, in the little drawing-room furnished in the early Victorian manner detracted nothing from the pleasantness of it all.

“I thought I would show you an English country doctor’s practice,” said Mrs. Wentworth in the train on their way back to town. “I don’t know what Irish ones are like—yes, I know, but I wasn’t really bothering about his attack of influenza, at least not much—I used it as a pretext as they say in the law courts, to lead you astray from your work and give you what I think you want, a little holiday. I am afraid I am a very wicked woman,” she went on, “for it was partly to please myself. I have known Dr. Forbes and his practice for many years. I used to go visiting there when I was quite a young girl and when I heard from his sister, Maria, that he was thinking of selling the place I wanted to see it again just as it was in the old days. Maria is one of those people who love sneezing and coughing in letters, and when she brought his late attack of influenza into her letter the whole of this little plot occurred to me bringing you into it. But you will forgive me, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said he laughing, “I forgive you.”

And yet he felt that she was holding something back, and he had an uneasy feeling that all this expedition was a way of saying to him that he wasn’t fit for Harley Street, that, as a doctor, his place was amidst the simple-minded and the humble and meek of the world; the world where farm houses were the palaces and cow-haunted meadows the Hyde Parks.

Perhaps this was so. I don’t know. Nor do I know whether, considering the fact that the practice at Rookhurst might be falling empty it seemed to her a good place to pop him into, he and Pat and all the rest of his belongings and possibilities, to say nothing of the probabilities that might bud and flower for him in the glasshouse atmosphere of the West End.

Maybe, but all the same it is possible that her intentions were not entirely altruistic, and that she spoke the truth about wanting to see the old place as she had known it and before it came into a stranger’s possession. She had not always been Victoria Wentworth with a house in Cambridge Terrace.

She had been Victoria Grey, daughter of Colonel Grey, of Hawkhurst; living in a small house at the foot of the hill and in modest circumstances. The Greys were friends of the Forbes’ and she often used to go over and stay with Maria; that was twenty years ago. She was about nineteen then and Forbes was fifty-nine, but a hale and hearty man and ‘Why not?’ had said Maria to herself, visioning Victoria as a sister-in-law; for in those days the brother of Maria did not seem more than forty or so to the eyes of Maria.

She had dangled the idea in a veiled way before the nose of Victoria which, without turning up, turned away from it.

She liked him, but she could not imagine herself marrying a man like that—all the same, when she was married to Wentworth she would sometimes look back in a hazy sort of way at happy times, considering the life she might have led in those peaceful surroundings as against the life she was leading amidst the bricks and mortar, the tinsel and falsity and friendlessness of West End London.

Perhaps not quite friendless considering that such good people as Percy Sinnett and Lady Arnold and Lydia Becker were amongst her acquaintances—but friendless enough.

Platonic love may be possible between a man and a woman, but not between a woman and a man. In my own private opinion it is possible between neither.

Still, I am not Plato.

But there is an affection (you can call it silver-plated platonic love if you like) possible between a woman and a man, if the woman is of an affectionate and simple nature. I have seen a love affair of this sort between a pretty young girl and an old bottle-nosed sailorman. I have seen a woman putting her arm most lovingly round the neck of a carthorse. This brand of affection is, I think, impossible between two women, only between a woman and a man—or an animal.

From what I have heard of Wentworth he was an animal all right and a man animal as well; all the same, and though thus doubly gifted, I very much doubt if he had the power to inspire this warm feeling which is partly, in essence, protective.

Perhaps Flynn had, and that is why she had chummed up with him almost at first sight, instigated by nature—he was certainly not unwanting in the need for protection.

She had ordered the brougham that had taken them to the station to meet them for the return journey, and having deposited him at his door with injunctions to give her love to Pat, she drove off home leaving him to finish the happy day according to his own devices.

It had been a happy day.

“Great is the power of white simplicity,” money could not have bought it, no more than it can buy unplucked daffodils, or ease of mind from petty worries.

James met him in the hall with the announcement that a lady was in the waiting-room. She was one of Dr. Parsloe’s patients. Not knowing that Dr. Parsloe had moved to Cavendish Square she had called to see him; she seemed in great distress.

“Why on earth didn’t you send her on to Cavendish Square?” asked Flynn.

James hadn’t, simply because one of his duties was to redirect Dr. Parsloe’s letters and some days ago he had received a message that Dr. Parsloe was going on holiday to Hunstanton and that any letters that might possibly come were to be sent on there.

“All the same,” said Flynn, “he’d have left a locum tenens at Cavendish Square and she could have seen him!” James had not thought of that, or so he alleged.

Flynn, remembering the lady who had called to see the man next door and who had been bottled by the thoughtful James for the good of the practice and remembering also Simon, had his doubts.

But he said nothing. Whatever had been done had evidently been done for the best.

He went into the consulting-room; the lights were on and from a chair by the asbestos gas fire, which was on, a black-garbed lady with a pale face rose to meet him.

This was Mrs. Murgatroyd, of Cumberland Place. Mrs. Murgatroyd, who had lost her husband some five years ago, did not wear crêpe, all the same she was still a widow in appearance. A permanent widow one might have called her. Murgatroyd, though a very rich man, had been nothing out of the ordinary in the way of husbands and had left a will so complicated by unexpressed suspicions of his wife’s sanity, chastity, and common sense (you know those sort of wills, or you would if you were a Probate lawyer), and so kinked with intricacies designed to frustrate the death duty men that it took over a year before probate was obtained, and then Mrs. Murgatroyd found herself a widow with one thousand seven hundred and fifty a year and the lease of the house in Cumberland Place; the bulk of the property, some eight or nine thousand a year, going to her only son Albert on his coming of age (she had no daughters). Also there was a proviso that if she married again she would have nothing.

And yet she mourned over the death of Murgatroyd—or seemed to. Personally, I think she did; there are women made like that.

Now, what had brought her to-night to see her friend Dr. Parsloe was the fact that Albert had attained his majority a little while ago, coupled with the resultant fact that he was at the present moment in Vine Street police station.

It was the kindly custom of the police in those days, and for all I know it is the custom still, to keep a drunk and incapable gentleman in cold storage, so to speak, until his reason and the use of his legs returned to him and then to communicate with his nearest friend or relative with a view to bail. He would have to appear before a magistrate in the morning, but, at least, he would not have to spend the night in a cell.

This had happened in the case of Albert, his unfortunate mother had been communicated with and she had rushed at once to her oldest and best friend Dr. Parsloe for assistance and advice.

James, the beneficent and kindly, had given her a seat in the waiting-room and smelling salts. Sympathy was what she wanted as well as help, and though she could not tell James the facts of the case, he being a servant, she accepted his suggestion that she should wait for Dr. Flynn’s return.

“I am very sorry,” said Flynn, “but Dr. Parsloe is no longer here, he is practising now in Cavendish Square, but my servant tells me he is not to be found there at the moment as he has gone to Hunstanton—is there anything I can do for you?”

Incautious question motivated by a good heart and the sight of a female in distress!

Ten minutes later he was in a hansom on his way to Vine Street.

They had Albert in a cell. He had been arrested at four o’clock that afternoon for being drunk and disorderly in the Burlington Arcade, said he had been to a luncheon, but he had not resisted the police, which was all to the good.

He was rather stout and very well dressed and rather pleasant of feature and the police seemed to like him, treating him more as a joke than a prisoner and, as he was now able to walk and talk, having slept off the effect of the luncheon party, they released him.

The extraordinary thing to the mind of Flynn was the attitude of the released one to the whole affair.

It was as though nothing much had happened and as though he, Flynn, were an old acquaintance.

It is true he complained of his head, and: “Let’s come in here and get a pick-me-up” said he.

At one o’clock in the morning Flynn, returning to his home and practice, paused in the hall for a moment, debating in his mind whether Cherry had gone to bed or not. Going up to see, he found him in his sitting-room.

He refused the suggestion of a drink.

Then he told his story till he reached where they went into the bar to obtain for the disimprisoned one a pick-me-up.

“The damned place was full of people who seemed to know him. I had a ginger ale and he had a whisky on account of his head, and he began telling the bargirl what had happened to him. She seemed to think it a great joke and so did his friends. He put a five-pound note down on the counter and stood them drinks all round. I tried to get him away but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Why didn’t you leave him to it?”

“Because I’d promised his mother to bring him home to her. Well,” he went on, “I did my best to get him out and away from that lot; he seemed sober, but he was drinking and all he’d say to me was ‘Yes, I’ll come in a minute,’ till I got so sick of the business I went out and left him. I thought I’d give him a run for his money and go back and have another try. I walked halfway up Regent Street and came back and he was gone. The bargirl was a decent sort and I told her everything and she said she believed they’d taken him off to James’ bar in Panton Street, that there was a Colonel Nox with him; I went there and there was no sign of him, I even asked one of the barmen if he had seen a gentleman named Colonel Nox and he said yes, he’d just been in with several friends, he’d heard them say they were going on to the Criterion bar. I went on there——”

“Wait a minute,” said Cherry, “till I get something to support me.” He put some whisky into a glass on the side table and a dash of soda.

“Well? You went on to the Cri—and did you find him?”

“Yes, I found him all right but he was drunk.”

“It was the back blow of the earlier drunk,” said Cherry. “I expect he’d had no food—well, what happened then?”

“Oh, I got him away and into a cab and drove him home and when I got there I couldn’t get him in till the cabman left his horse in charge of a policeman and helped to get him up the steps.”

“Nice for old Mother Murgatroyd.”

“Damn old Mother Murgatroyd,” cried Flynn, “the old woman went for me for bringing him home in that condition, said she’d never get over the shame of it—didn’t go for me exactly, but wouldn’t hear a word of what I had to tell her, froze me out; not a word of thanks.”

The other laughed. “If you are hunting for thanks or gratitude amongst patients—and that old woman was a patient seeing the disease she’s got in the shape of her son—well, you’ll be hunting a long time.”

“That hasn’t been my experience,” said Flynn. “Maybe not,” said the other, “but you’ve got to remember this isn’t the East End.”

Then the assister of sons to their homes, having again refused the offer of a drink, went off to his bed at the end of his perfect day leaving Cherry in meditation.

Cherry was an original-thinking individual; he had long formulated the idea that the proper study of the sane is the proper basis for the proper study of the insane—and vice versa.

The doings of Flynn seemed to swing between these two worlds, or shall we say, spheres of influence. The swing was not much, perhaps, but still it was there, as compared to that exhibited by the ordinary level-headed man, or ought one to say ‘level-hearted.’ For the heart inclines to swing men from the normal as often, perhaps, as the head.

Especially a good heart.

Cherry, considering the case of Flynn, came to the conclusion that he was too good-hearted to swing without damage to his pocket and his head amidst the attractions and repulsions of a sophisticated world.

A nursery was more his proper place.

Then, having finished his meditations, he tapped out his pipe and went to bed.

Whatever Pat’s private opinions of the world may have been they had evidently brightened considerably since his translation from Cunningham Mansions.

A child’s entry into the world really dates from the moment it begins to sprawl. He had not done much of that at the Mansions, held back maybe by the lack of vitality that had come on him perhaps due to the change over from the mother’s milk and good healthy dirt of Sardinia Street to the cows’ milk and refinement of the Corkran ménage; however it was different now, he was sprawling all right and evidently getting ready to stand on his feet and hit the world in the face; in other words arching himself like a caterpillar, on hands and knees when on the floor and travelling over the carpet at the rate of knots, James’ term (picked up from his sea faring experiences). The good sister had departed. She had rather antagonized Biddy ‘She and her beads,’ and James, having procured a piece of board about a foot wide from Tylers in Welbeck Street, it was fastened outside the door so that the door could be left open, barring any attempt to sprawl into the passage; not that it would have mattered much for there was always someone about, either Flynn when he was at home or James or Biddy, also Mr. Ginnis seemed quite content with his surroundings and not anxious to enlarge them.

“I declare to God,” said Biddy, “you might hunt before you found a quieter child, lave him with a tray of crockery ware and you wouldn’t have a cup smashed; singin’ and gugglin’ to himself he does be if you lave him alone, as if there was some one with him, and who’s to say there isn’t, it’s my belafe childer left to themselves have better company round them than the likes of us, as I well remember meself playin’ in the turf house to get shut of my old bitch of a stepmother. Tay parties I’d be havin’ and I wasn’t playin’ alone.”

A vague statement suggestive of pleasant possibilities and the charming idea that little Mary Parsloe might be playing about with Pat when other and grosser folk were absent.

Not that it occurred to Flynn. The fact that the child was happy and getting on well was enough for him.

There were times when the responsibility of Pat weighed a bit heavy on Flynn; for away at some backdoor of his mind Mrs. Ginnis would be apt to appear asking questions that could not be answered without invoking the law and raising scandal’s pointing finger—anyhow making it more than unpleasant for Julia Corkran. It was generally when he was a bit out of sorts that these Mrs. Ginnis fits took him, as on the morning after his adventure with Mr. Murgatroyd, or, shall we say, Mrs. Murgatroyd.

The early morning post had brought him a postcard from Dr. Casey asking him to come down to Endell Street for a consultation in the case of Mr. Harris the fried fish shop keeper of Drury Lane. “I’m not so sure it isn’t T.B. he’s suffering from,” wrote Casey, “anyhow I’d like you to have a look at him. I’ve told him you’d let him down cheap and only charge two guineas; so maybe you’ll take that—will you? I’ll be in at eleven and we could go there together.”

To Flynn this morning a bit out of sorts, the invitation to the scene of his former activities brought up a trace of the uneasy ghost of the lady already mentioned. Goodness knows her child was well away from its first surroundings and the prospect of a more than doubtful future, but that brilliant fact did not alter the position. The fact that a grit in the eye is caused by a grit of diamond dust does not alter the fact that it is a grit.

He took a cab to Endell Street and picking up Casey they went together on foot to the shop of Mr. Harris where in a back parlour smelling of fried fish he diagnosed the patient’s complaint, received his fee and departed, leaving Casey to carry on his rounds.

Passing near Sardinia Street he paused, being for a moment undecided and then, making up his mind, took a short cut that would land him close to the old Spanish Ambassador’s house. He thought he would just have a look in to see how the Ginnises were getting along since his last visit—it came to him that he might be able to do something for them if they had got any more broken down in mind, body and estate since last he saw them. It would ease his mind if he were able to do them a kindness.

He reached the shop and found it empty.

Mrs. Purefoy, the old furniture dealer a few doors down said that Pat Ginnis was dead, dropped down sudden in a fit and was taken to Guy’s Hospital she thought it was.

“But I only saw him a little while ago,” said Flynn.

“Well, it was a little over ten days ago he was took and Mary Ginnis had scarce got him under the sod than she sold the business and went off with the children. A hundred and fifty she’d got for the business and another fifty for the old furniture, yet she’d gone off owing Mrs. Purefoy fifteen shillings for the restuffing of an ottoman.”

“She’s gone to Australia,” said Mrs. Purefoy, “I had it from Mrs. Rafferty, for those Irish are always sticking together like bugs in a rug when they’re not telling tales about each other, she has an uncle living there and she’s going by way of Glasgow where she has some relatives that keep a marine store shop; Mrs. Rafferty had it all out of her over a glass of gin at the ‘Porter’s Arms.’ Mrs. Rafferty said she’s left everyone in debt, what between borrowing money from them, and not paying what she owes—was she owing anything to you, sir?”

“No,” said Flynn. “I asked about her because she was an old patient of mine; as a matter of fact I’d have liked to do something for her—but she’s gone, and there it is. How much did you say she owed you? fifteen shillings, well I’ll pay it, if you don’t mind.”

Mrs. Purefoy didn’t mind in the least and Flynn went on his way. It was as though an incubus had been taken off his shoulders, not perhaps a heavy load but all the same no lighter because it was only felt at times though always hinting of itself. The vision of Mrs. Ginnis robbed of her child had vanished giving place to a picture of Mrs. Ginnis robbing her neighbours and an even more comforting picture of Mrs. Ginnis safe in Australia.

When he got home the first thing he did was to have a look at Pat. Pat was asleep, looking fat as a cherub and clasping to himself what looked like a fiend out of hell. It was a golliwog bought for him at Barkers by James.

Flynn contemplated the pleasing picture.

To tell the truth, the child had got such a hold on him that it might be said—with all due respect to the virtue of Mrs. Ginnis—that he had succeeded in the crowning blunder of becoming a father.

Perhaps that was why he rather resented the golliwog, the gift of another person, if James could be called a person and not a kindly but interfering Influence.

This letter from Miss Neighbour, received on the day following the Ginnis incident pleased Flynn.

So the first letter hadn’t been what it seemed, a heartless dismissal of him—the old lady was still on the books, he had misjudged her, and sitting down he wrote out the prescription and sent it by the twelve o’clock post from the office in Vere Street.

He little knew the battle that had been going on in the earthly tenement of Mrs. Shawl between religious opinion in the upper rooms and wind in the basement.

“Anything to relieve me of this wind,” had groaned the sufferer, “and that little pill did it; are you sure he did not leave you more than one for me?”

“No,” had replied the other and she lied, by implication. He had, in fact, left three in a little box which she had supplied for the purpose, for it was his habit, born of Endell Street and abhorrent to the spirit of Harley Street, to carry a useful drug or two about with him in pill form, such as calomel or bicarbonate of soda, it saved time and trouble.

The little box had been lost or mislaid, hence the lie.

“But,” continued the mendacious one, “I can easily write to him and get the prescription. It won’t mean his calling.” Hence the letter which quite cheered the recipient up.

Gratitude and good feeling, anyhow, weren’t quite dead in the world.

Another happy event of that day was the beatification and audification of Mr. Huskisson. Flynn, leaving Mr. Huskisson’s general condition aside and speaking about his ears, had given his opinion that the deafness Mr. Huskisson was suffering from arose chiefly from wax in his ears and advised him to have them washed out.

Mr. Huskisson had carried the opinion and advice to his aurist, Mr. Stonner, (you can imagine Mr. Stonner’s delight), the thing had been done and Mr. Huskisson could now hear ‘very, very, very much better—and thanks to you.’

He came to say all this.

One of the rare pleasures in the life of your medical man is the gratitude of a patient, when the gratitude is really earned.

How Stonner had come to miss the real cause of the trouble was perhaps due to the fact that Mr. Huskisson had come to consult him, not for deafness but for pain behind the right ear. The old gentleman had been reading up The Family Doctor and had got mastoid mischief into his mind. He had said nothing of his deafness which was obvious and seemed as much part of him as the Albert Memorial is part of London and the aurist being an honest, if a bit careless, man, finding the trouble was neuralgic, overlooked the question of deafness.

Flynn being a good old general practitioner with a wide view of things had spotted the probable cause of the deafness. That is why the gratitude of this patient was really earned and enjoyed by him (Flynn).

“Would you care to come with me this afternoon,” said the over bubbling with gratitude Mr. Huskisson, “I am going to an At Home given by my friends the Morgan Richards in Lancaster Gate. They are old friends of mine and I am free to bring with me anyone I like. They are Americans. Mrs. Wentworth when she first mentioned your name to me told me you had but recently started here in Harley Street and were in fact making your practice amongst us in London. I think these are most important people for you to know. You will excuse me for saying this; but I am an old man with a good deal of knowledge of London and I know, in the case of a young man like yourself, the importance of getting about.”

“Thanks,” said Flynn, “I shall be very pleased to come.”

“I will call for you at a little after four,” said the other, “and drive you there,” and off he went.

Yes, things were decidedly brighter. It was as though the vanishing of Mrs. Ginnis, like a cloud from the horizon, had allowed the sun to shine more brightly on things including the practice and certainly including Pat.

He had discovered this morning that the vanishing of Mrs. Ginnis had altered the situation about Pat considerably.

The boy who has come into illegal possession of an apple cannot enjoy it properly if he feels the greengrocer may be coming after him. The enjoyment to be got out of Pat might seem to be a doubtful quantity, but whatever it was it had been shadowed by the shade of Mrs. Ginnis. As a matter of fact he had come to care for the child a lot, a fondness that had been a bit blighted by the shadow.

Having seen Mr. Huskisson out he went in to have a look at his well-endowed possession. It was nearly quarter to one and James was in the room with the child.

James was seated on a chair. He was finishing a packet of sandwiches. He brought his luncheon with him like this and sometimes he would eat it in the kitchen, sometimes in the waiting-room, sometimes in the hall.

To-day he was having it in the nursery and Mr. Ginnis was seated on the floor opposite to him and seeming vastly interested in the proceedings.

“You haven’t been giving him any of those sandwiches?” asked Flynn who had very strict ideas on the subject of dietetics.

“No,” said James.

Mr. Ginnis said nothing.

The John Morgan Richards House in Lancaster Gate was not far from the Forsyth Mansion. The word ‘Mansion’ fitted and fits all these big houses in Lancaster Gate that supply light and air and room as well as cover and drainage to their occupants, and the Richards were worthy of their habitation.

John Morgan was top man of the American business colony in London, but he was much more than a business man; literature was one of his affairs; he was the owner of the Academy with Lewis Hind for editor, and he had for daughter the most brilliant woman novelist of the day; a day when the literary firmament was filled with stars, some fixed and still shining, others falling or preparing to fall.

The literary world that lay under the literary stars was the same murky sort of place as it is now, with unfortunate publishers being waylaid by literary road agents and authors and critics dancing in literary circles round a hypnotized public.

The same old public that had swallowed Robert Montgomery till Macaulay made it sick him up. But the Academy did not go in for puffery and its editor, who was here to-day, was buttonholed by Mr. Huskisson, introduced to Flynn and finding that the latter belonged to the Irish Literary Society and was a doctor, he got rid of him by introducing him to ‘Clemmy’ Shorter, the editor of the Sphere, who didn’t care a button about Irish literary societies but was interested in doctoring as he was suffering at the moment from a touch of sciatica and said so in such a persuasive way that, in less than five minutes, he had extracted a consultation and prescription from his victim, for nothing.

That was Mr. Shorter’s way, and a very pleasant way it was, for this little man with oily hair and not very clean finger nails did his picking up of unconsidered trifles such as the Brontë letters, blandished out of old Brontë, in such a manner that it might be said he gave more than he got. He gave sunshine, the sort of sunshine that swells the Lusitanian grapes and makes people play guitars. He also could give information, as, for instance, that the Irish were still fighting the Battle of the Boyne, and introductions to people of interest.

He introduced Flynn to Skrine, and then dropped him in favour of the tea-room. Many people will remember Skrine, long and lanky and with a face that recalled Calamity Smith of the Strand Magazine, and like Calamity Smith with a heart of gold and a helping hand for strugglers—and a tongue for the opulent and successful impudent, as when asked what he thought of George Moore having the face to boast of his amours with a certain lady, compared it to the face of an oyster; the christian name of the lady adding pungency to a picture, not perhaps photographic, yet not unrecognizable. Mr. Skrine was in good spirits to-day and good form and was an excellent Mrs. Jarley as an exhibitor of the literary, artistic, and social works collected by Mrs. John Morgan Richards for her At Home.

The genial T. P. O’Connor, ‘Tay Pay’ of the Weekly and the House of Commons, the maker of literary and artistic and social reputations. He could make one in a night, and if it faded and vanished in a fortnight that was not his fault—he never unmade one. Blumenfeld, the editor of the Daily Express, whose word was as good as his wit; just a glimpse of him, for he never looked in at At Homes for more than a few minutes. Stephen Phillips doomed to an early literary death, and as surely marked by Time for a later resurrection. The Comtesse de Favarolles, who, it was said, came to London to found a salon and only succeeded in founding a restaurant (a very good restaurant it was), a publisher who, according to Skrine, sold authors as well as books, a new art painter whose picture of a horse (according to the same authority) was rejected by the Academy because they thought it was the picture of a windmill, and unlike one; a banker who wrote poetry that had all the meticulous excellence of a balance-sheet. All these celebrities, some of whom were vaguely known to him and with whom he was now, so to speak, rubbing elbows, gave to Flynn a pleasant feeling of being in the swim of a world a million miles from Endell Street.

Harley Street whatever it had done for him had, at least, given him this.

Yes, the good weather was still holding and a little later, when in the tea-room, there came a perfect burst of sunshine—Mrs. Wentworth.

He hadn’t seen her in the crowd till now, a cup of tea in her hand and talking apparently to a waiter who, however, was an attaché belonging to the French Embassy, for it was the habit of highly-placed foreigners in those days, and maybe is still, to attend midday functions in evening dress.

Mrs. Wentworth explained this a little later.

“I quite forgot,” said she, “and asked him to get me a cup of tea, then I saw the little red rosette in his buttonhole and I couldn’t apologize, that’s one of the nasty little tricks the social world plays on one—but he got me the cup of tea—and how are you?”

He told her he was quite well and explained how he had come with Huskisson. “I’ve got to thank you for a friend like that,” said he. “It’s good to have friends—and to-day is a lucky day for me.” He told her the Ginnis news and of the resurrection of Mrs. Shawl, to say nothing of the recovery of his ears by Mr. Huskisson.

“So you see the practice isn’t going too badly,” said he, “and I feel it’s you I have to thank for it all.”

“Me! Why, I’ve done nothing.”

“It’s not what you’ve done, it’s just you, you’ve brought me luck and, somehow, a belief in people.”

Mrs. Wentworth said nothing for a moment. She seemed considering the compliment. Then she said: “Maybe you are right. I’ll tell you a little secret. It may sound silly, but, somehow—and it’s pleasant to think—somehow I seem to bring luck, people have told me it. We had an old servant who saved up a little money and bought a small fish shop in Porchester Road, but she wouldn’t open it till I’d bought something from her. I was to be her first customer, so I went and bought a lemon sole.”

“And she succeeded.”

“Beyond the dreams of avarice. Last time I saw her she told she was making three pounds ten a week clear profit after paying for everything, including her living expenses.”

He laughed:

“Of course she would,” said he, “but it’s not only money you bring—” Then he checked himself, held up by something he could not express; the love that had surged up in his heart for this dear friend. Quite—quite a different thing from the ordinary love of man for woman, though, surely, by the same root.

Meanwhile Mr. Huskisson had forgotten his protégé and himself in a discussion on the policy of the new Government with Mr. Atkinson, the Liberal member for West Derby, and with locked horns they had been pushing at one another like two old goats not yet come to the butting point. Two old goats on a cliff top, the cliff top represented by the social platform of the At Home. The danger of falling off it acting as a restraint on their energies.

Mr. Atkinson was Mrs. Murgatroyd’s brother, and she had brought him with her to the At Home to show him off. He had been only recently elected.

She had lost him in the crowd and forgotten him in converse with some friends; now in the tea-room she found him again. The goats had stopped their political manœuvring and were talking of health matters, and the Atkinson was saying to the other: “Well, thank God I’m feeling pretty fit. Only for a touch of gout now and then, yet persistent. Tell it not in Gath I have tried Buxton, but derived no benefit from the waters. I say this with all due respect to Derbyshire.”

“Ah,” said the provider of patients, who had just perceived Flynn with Mrs. Wentworth, “I know what you want. Mrs. Murgatroyd, your brother is in need of medical advice, let me introduce you both to the best adviser in town.”

And he took the lady up and introduced her to Flynn. Then Huskisson, whose gadfly mind had been seized with the sight of the Swedish Ambassador was off without waiting to see the full effect of his introduction.

There was nothing much to see, a slight bow, a frozen stare, a turn away; and followed by her unfortunate brother, she was gone.

“Heavens!” said Mrs. Wentworth. “What an awful woman!”

Flynn was, for a moment, knocked off his balance. He had never been insulted in his life before. Then he said: “I’ll tell you about it in a minute.” She looked at him.

“Not here,” said she. “Wait, I’m off anyhow, so let’s say good-bye to our host and hostess. I can give you a lift in my carriage a lot of the way home if you’d like. I’m going to Barkers.”

In the carriage he told her of the Murgatroyd business. It was as much as she could do to keep herself from laughing; not that she was in a laughing mood. It hit her very nearly, this insult to her friend. “You had done all you could,” said she. “Why didn’t you let the little beast find his way home, another man would, only,” she finished, “you are not another man.”

“No,” he said, “I suppose I’m not.” Which obvious truth agreed on, they were silent for a minute till they reached Barkers. It was almost on closing time and she had to make a purchase if possible, a pair of evening shoes to match with a coloured remnant she had in her bag and to be worn that evening. She explained this. “And I’ll see you soon and have a talk over this,” said she, evidently meaning the Murgatroyd affair, “and don’t worry about it.”

The way the thing had hit him combined with the facts of the case emphasised the fact that he was not another man.

It seemed to be as she contrasted the shoes with the colour of the pattern, that it only wanted this business to confirm her opinion as to the dubiety of his choice of happy existence in the smiling currents of wealthy and prosperous London life; that river where the sucker keeps company with the shark and where, not to be smashed by the tossing brass posts carried along on the current, one must be brazen.

High explosives are not simple in their chemical structure; built up out of seemingly non-explosive elements it is all a matter of addition and disposition. Then the tap of a hammer will blow the roof off.

It is the same in the world of mind as in the world of matter.

Flynn, on returning home, put the Murgatroyd incident aside from his thoughts, or fancied so; he had other things to think of; a leak in the scullery sink discovered by Biddy and served up to him with lamentations and wonderments as to how these old English plumbers didn’t feel ashamed of themselves and their ways, and a statement that the chops she had ordered for his dinner hadn’t come and he’d have to do with the remains of the cold mutton which she was turning into a hash, also that the gas man had come to measure the meter and had given her lip owing to her objecting to his walking into the kitchen without a rap at the door as if the house belonged to him.

Little things, but useful in their way as distractors from major worries.

All the same Mrs. Murgatroyd was there.

And no doubt she was there next morning when sitting down to breakfast and opening his letters he found a letter from Dr. Stonner the aurist.

A letter indicating half concealed resentment and pained surprise about the case of Mr. Huskisson.

Flynn had said to old Huskisson something in this manner. “I believe it’s wax. Go and tell your ear man to wash your ears out and then we’ll see.” Something like that, without dreaming of offence to the aurist, without recognizing that he was putting his foot into another man’s speciality.

The old gentleman’s deafness was Stonner’s property, and here was a damned Irishman (to judge by the name) trespassing on it. Chap living in Harley Street. Dr. Stonner on looking up the name in the Medical Directory found only one Flynn, living in Endell Street. He called on Gregson the West End Medical Agent who knew everything about everyone and got the truth of the matter. Then he sat down and wrote his letter, suggesting that there was such a thing as Medical Etiquette. The anger of Flynn was not lessened by the feeling that maybe he had put his foot in it, ably assisted by Huskisson who had no doubt repeated his words verbatim.

And there was nothing to be done about it. Stonner’s letter was too vague; there was nothing to reply to, of course he might call and see the man and try to explain the matter, but he did not feel like that; besides, there was nothing to explain but the truth and the truth would not help matters.

On top of Stonner’s letter this bright morning he was a bit worried about Pat.

Biddy had been kept awake by Pat during the night, and when Flynn went to see the child he found him restless and not his bright self; also he had a bit of a temperature, but young children will run temperatures for next to nothing.

“What have you been giving him in the way of food?” asked Flynn.

“Faith and he’s had nothing beyond the ordinary,” replied Biddy. “I said that to meself in the night, and I said to meself ‘maybe it’s the milk I gave him last thing that’s cruddled on him’ but that’s only supposin’—anyhow, he’s had nothing beyond the ordinary.”

Flynn who had forgotten James and the sandwiches incident, left it at that and went upstairs to put on his frock coat before going out when up came Biddy rushing to say that Miss Hancock had called and was in the consulting-room.

Miss Hancock had made another of her flying visits to London, her object being the getting rid of the flat.

The unfortunate Julia had gone in for the flat life away from her relatives in Ireland partly to get rid of Miss Hancock, and partly owing to her broken love affair.

Now that the love affair was mended she found herself again in the toils of Jane Hancock.

The sudden acquisition of wealth had been a very mixed blessing to Julia; lying on a sofa and reading poetry and attending to her nerves she had never been brought face to face with money problems. She had enough for her wants; the money came in from her bank as naturally and without trouble as the water for her bath from the Metropolitan Water Board, or the gas from the Gas Light and Coke Company. She hadn’t to do any of the stoking or tap turning.

But the Fortune was a different matter; and it was not a fortune lying in a bank; it lay in Irish Land, and some of it lay in Joint Stock Companies, whatever they were, and one piece of it lay in such a manner as to include a mile of fishing rights on the Shannon, with eternal actions for trespass and a probably pending law suit as to the validity of the rights bought by the O’Connor Moores, who claimed their descent, well backed by their reputation for pugnacity, from Brian Boru; a family bristling with spikes as do the hedgehog and with whom it was the main desire of Jane Hancock’s heart to have an encounter.

She was a good business woman and Julia, for all her helplessness in money matters was no fool and so, in the event she let Jane do most of the worrying, anyhow as far as the petty details were concerned.

The getting rid of the flat and its furniture was one of the petty details.

“When you are married,” said Jane, “you will have no need of that place and its worries. Whenever you run over to London you can stay at an hotel; I’ll settle it all for you.” Never a word about Pat. The two women never talked much about him now. Julia, assured that the thing was being looked after by Flynn left it at that. It was Flynn’s business. Not that she had lost all interest in the child, she felt that now with all her money she would like to do something for its future and said so. Jane concurring.

“I’ll see Flynn about it when I go over,” said she. “I don’t see really that it’s your affair, it was his business entirely and he has taken it on; still, if you’d like to give him a sum towards its future how would a hundred pounds do?”

“Two hundred,” said Julia after a moment’s consideration, “and at any time later on if I can ever do anything for it I shall be glad. Be sure and tell him that. Poor mite, it wasn’t its fault to be left like that without a protector in the world.”

She was beginning to turn sentimental but Jane cut it off.

“I’ll tell him two hundred,” said she, “and I think if you ask me, that it wasn’t a poor mite, but a very fortunate one to find a good man like him to look after it, to say nothing about what you did for it. But I’ll see him when I get to town and tell him what you say.”

Flynn found her in the consulting-room and gave her greeting.

She seemed to have forgotten her last visit to him.

“I’ve just looked in to see you on a small business,” said she. “I’m not staying at the flat. My niece has decided to give it up as she will be living almost entirely in Ireland when she is married—and how are you getting on?”

“Oh pretty well,” said he, “considering all things.”

“I’m glad of that. I would have called on you yesterday only I have been so busy seeing about the furniture, getting rid of it; you see there’s two years more of the lease to run out and there’s no use letting the place furnished, of course one gets more for a place furnished, but it’s twice the trouble making inventories and all that, to say nothing of the way tenants destroy furniture.”

“Yes,” he said wondering what all this was leading up to. He felt vaguely irritated, Pat lying there sick and these two women with their minds set on property, and furniture. The feeling was quite unjustifiable, but justice has little to do with feeling.

“Yes,” he said. “It would be less trouble to you to let it empty, no doubt.”

“Which isn’t to say,” she went on, “that getting rid of the things isn’t a trouble. You wouldn’t believe the sharks these furniture people are. It isn’t a question of auctioning. I’ll have nothing to do with auctions; it’s a question of selling right out; however, I don’t want to bother you with these worries, what I came this morning about is that Julia—my niece—has a feeling that she would like to allocate a small sum of money, just as a matter of charity; for the benefit of that wretched child.”

Flynn said nothing for a moment. It was in this moment that Mrs. Murgatroyd, Mr. Stonner, Pat’s condition and the supposed heartless nature of women joined to form the explosive mixture.

He got up from his chair, went to the door and opened it. “I wish you good day,” said he.

It was worse than being kicked out.

In Harley Street, the unfortunate Jane almost rubbed her behind.

Amazement struggling with perfectly justifiable anger had reduced her mind to only one expression of her feelings: “Well! of all the!—of all the!—of all the!—”

Then hailing a passing hansom she got in, ordering the driver to take her to Alexander’s, the furniture people, in Tottenham Court Road.

That evening after dinner at the Hans Crescent Hotel Miss Hancock sat down and wrote to her niece, Julia Corkran.

One day, about a fortnight later, Dr. Cherry called upon Mrs. Wentworth.

She had written to him asking him to call if possible at four o’clock. He fancied the business might have something to do with her sister Violet; and he was right.

He had been doctoring—at least, tinkering—over Violet for the last year or so; very pretty, and at times, vivacious, she was, all the same, a chronic nervous invalid; she was undependable as the weather. Curiously enough, her case was not unlike that of Julia Corkran, with the linking fact, that like all these cases, it was the cause of all sorts of trouble to relatives and friends.

Yes, it was about Violet that Mrs. Wentworth wanted to see him. Violet was engaged to be married.

She had gone off a month ago on a six-weeks’ visit to the Parkers, of Pepworth, taking with her her invalid chair, her Bengers food, her hot water bottle, and a maid to see her safe on the journey. There was a Colonel Curbury staying with the Parkers. “And she’s engaged to him,” said Mrs. Wentworth.

“Well, I’m damned!” said Cherry.

“I felt like saying that myself,” said she. “I only got the letter three days ago and, of course, I went off at once to see her, and it’s true, and she’s a different person.”

“What’s he like?”

“Oh, he’s all right, from what I saw of him; one of the kindest of people, I am sure, with plenty of money; he’s a cousin of the Parkers. But if you ask me what he’s like personally—well! do you remember the Sunday you took me to the Zoo and the man at the gate haggled over letting us in till you showed him your Fellow’s ticket?”

“Oh, that chap, well, he wasn’t so bad.”

“I wasn’t thinking of him, but the wart hog we saw that had just come from Africa or somewhere—if you can think of a nice, kindly, benevolent looking wart hog—and she adores him.”

“Well, you see, he’s a man.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s it—anyhow it’s better than her marrying an Adonis that might lead her a dreadful life like the Clackmannons, you saw their case in the papers. Do you know I think helpless people like Violet are sometimes guided by an extra sense of some sort like children—you remember, the picture of the children chasing a butterfly on the cliff edge and their guardian angel protecting them.”

The picture of the wart hog in his mind did not help to make the analogy complete but he said nothing for a moment, he was thinking things over.

For a long time she had been his best friend and for a good while now the suggestion of asking her to marry him had been on the door-step of his mind, finger on lip and hand on the knocker.

He had been held off by a lot of things. Though he was making lots of money she, on her side, was well-off and she had Violet to look after and a circle of friends that were not his circle (which mostly consisted of patients) and she had the Cambridge Terrace House on her hands and he never could imagine her being in Harley Street.

“Look here,” he said. “If Violet goes off and gets married what about you? I remember you telling me that you lived in London mostly for her sake and because she liked the house; you were never very keen on it, I remember.”

“And I’m not,” said she. “Oh, I shall let it and go and live in the country or somewhere and, if I want to come to London, stop at an hotel; one must keep in touch with one’s friends.”

“Why not go on living in London . . . some other part. Green Street or somewhere like that?”

“I don’t think so,” said she. “This place is as good as anywhere else in the West End. What I really want are trees and fresh air and the sky. You never see the sky in London.”

“I know. I know your temperament and your mind—up to a point; it’s my job to know people’s minds and temperaments. You went on sticking in London for the sake of Violet. Do you know what you are?”

“No.”

“You are one of the people who can never go insane.”

“And how is that?”

“Because you are unselfish.”

“Maybe you are right,” she said. “I think self drives more people into the lunatic asylums than anything else, but I am not unselfish, if you really knew me.”

“I know you so well that—I say——”

“Yes?”

“Will you change this place for Harley Street, will you put up with a man who, whatever else he may be, is fairly honest, will you——”

“Is this a proposal of marriage you are making?” she asked, laughing and looking straight into his eyes with an expression that told him how utterly hopeless such a suggestion would be.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s just that.”

Her eyes fell away from him.

“I wish I could say yes,” she said. “There are few people I like more than you, but it’s impossible. Much as I like you, it’s not that way.”

“I see.”

There was no use in going further, he knew her too well not to know her position in this matter and the fact that she could not alter it. The thing was almost like a business deal that he had proposed—it was in some ways.

I expect Aphrodite and Priapus and Pan and all that crowd must be shocked at times by offers like this, unnatural in the groves of Arcady but natural enough in a climate and society where Cupid goes about in a muffler and generally carrying an account book under his arm.

The matter having been put aside they did not refer to it again, otherwise Mrs. Wentworth might have pointed out the fact that she was utterly unfit by nature and inclination for the life of a fashionable doctor’s wife; living forever in the background, accepted, in a social way, coldly if at all, by the more aristocratic of the patients, snubbed very often by the snobs.

No; the position of a country doctor’s wife, if she is acceptable is possible and even pleasant in its simple way. But Harley Street is not the country.

Cherry would have recognized all this if they had pursued the subject.

After a little while they began to talk about Flynn. Cherry, during the last few days, had felt a bit worried about his friend, Flynn. Pat’s condition was not improving, quite the other way about.

“I’m sure I don’t know what is wrong with him,” said he. “Old Cheadle is away on holiday, but Flynn had got his locum in. Travers, he’s a good man but he hasn’t been able to say much only that he suspects it’s tabes mesenterica.”

“What’s tabes mesenterica?”

Cherry laughed. “It’s a Latin name doctors give to poverty, it’s a form of tuberculosis.”

“But the child isn’t poor now.”

“No, but it comes of poor parents, living under bad conditions, so Flynn told me.”

“This will hit him hard—I mean if anything happened to it,” said she.

“Yes,” he said, “he’s that sort. Look at the way he’s taken it there to live at his place instead of getting it into a home or something. Look at the whole business from start to finish. Anyhow, he’s got fond of it—yes, it will hit him. Seems to me he’s one of the people made to be hit.”

Mrs. Wentworth said nothing more. Then, after a while, Cherry took himself off to see an old Mrs. Molesworth who lived in Oxford Terrace, under the supervision of a trained nurse, and under the pleasant conviction that she was the Queen of Sheba.

Cherry, having visited Her Majesty and received his fee and also a pineapple (she had a mania for pineapples) which he took with him back to Harley Street, drove on to see other patients, looking in at the Gridiron Club by the way.

The Grid was patronized by all sorts of people. Journalists, doctors, solicitors and what not; here he met in with Mr. Johnston, junior partner in the Medical Agents to whom Stonner had applied relative to the position of Flynn in the medical world.

Cherry had met Johnston, not in the medical world but at an At Home at the house of Mrs. Wentworth; Johnston was a connection of hers by marriage and, when Cherry met him to-day, her name turned up in the course of conversation.

“I saw her a day or two ago,” said Johnston “and funnily enough, about a medical practice. She has an old relative practicing at Rookhurst in Sussex who’s going to sell his place. She said he told her he was putting the business in our hands, which is true. Said she had a friend or relation or something who might be wanting to buy a practice like that and asked me to let her know before anything was definitely done.”

Now I wonder who was that, thought Cherry, meaning who was the friend or relation requiring this sort of medical aid. He thought for a moment of Flynn but put the idea aside, for Flynn would have told him had he been contemplating a change of practice.

Just about now old Mr. Flynn in Dublin wrote to his son in London telling him he was sending him a present of four pounds of Cork butter and complaining of the gout.

The letter bothered Flynn. At least the postscript did.

He remembered the old man as he had seen him last and he looked none too robust. He determined to take a few days off and run over to see him. Pat seemed better during the last day or so and Mr. Forsyth was so improved that he was nearly off the books.

Cherry would keep an eye on things to say nothing of James, to say nothing of Biddy.

So he went to Lloyds Bank and cashed a cheque for fifty pounds and started off from Euston with Punch and half-a-dozen illustrated papers to read on the journey. He was also dressed for the occasion in a suit of light tweed.

Never ill dressed even in the Endell Street days, he had, all the same, improved considerably in this respect under the magic of Harley Street. Cherry had pointed to Smalpage for suits and Amery and Loders for neckties to say nothing of Lock for hats and Bloggs for shoes, a fact that I have omitted to point out before, being so engaged with his practices, malpractices and benevolences.

In the train and drawing out from London there came to him a feeling of joyful release such as he had experienced the day Mrs. Wentworth had taken him down to Sussex. It was like getting from under a dish-cover. Perhaps it is the vastness of London that produces this effect on some natures, this feeling of release into a land where the sky can be seen not in strips between house tops and where trees, when they occur, don’t look like dusty prisoners.

The weather was lovely and the sea, when they reached Holyhead and the waiting Leinster, smooth.

Kingstown harbour looked just the same as they came in with the dawn spilling its splendour on the wild Wicklow hills and Davy Stevens selling his newspapers on the Carlisle pier just as dirty and delightful; the Dublin Wicklow and Wexford railway showing on its right Salt Hill and the Ladies’ Bathing place and the Beggars’ Bathing place where, in the dear dead days beyond recall, ladies of the proletariat used to bathe without bathing dresses yet without reproach; Westland Row station, when arrived at, looking just the same.

It was only three years and a half since he had been here last, but it seemed ten, yet the place was the same, including Mr. Mooney, the outside car driver, who chanced to be picking up that morning at Westland Row and who picked him up baggage and all and drove him home.

“And it’s well yure looking since I sawn you last,” said Mr. Mooney driving and at the same time attending to the infirmities of his rat-tailed mare with words of comfort and sometimes reproach. “Jay up y’devil or its the whip I’ll be taking to you—near four years is it and you not lookin’ a day’s difference, but the ould gentleman is not what he used to be. I drove him down to the Four Courts last Monday and, faith, I thought I’d have had to tie him on to the car coming back. You’ll find him a bit changed, I’m thinking,” which was a fact.

Mr. Flynn, apprised by wire of his son’s coming, was in the parlour, in an arm-chair, his gouty foot swathed in flannel on a stool.

But the old gentleman despite the pessimistic description of him by Mr. Mooney, didn’t seem so bad, quite cheerful in fact and looking good for another ten years or maybe a bit less.

“And if you hadn’t wired to me you were coming,” said he, “it’s I that’d have been sending for you to come; for I’ve got a big idea I’ll be telling you about in a minute—Tierney’s dead, you remember I wrote to you about him, and Mrs. Tierney called in to see me yesterday morning, and him not cold in his coffin, and she lamenting over the way he’d left her with a mortgage on the property and what the Death Duty men would be taking out of what’s left. Well now and before I tell you what’s in my mind how are you getting along; I mean is that new practice you’ve taken paying?”

Flynn told and the old gentleman having turned over the monetary details in his mind gave it as his opinion that this was a waiting business and that waiting businesses were always slow, that it was like a man taking a field and starting to cultivate it and that it would be better to buy a field already cultivated. “And it’s this way,” said he. “This swell practice of yours is like a man taking to growing pineapples instead of turnips, and that wants a lot of doing, between glass houses and all. However, you have lots of sense and as long as you don’t break into your capital you’re safe; but if I was you I’d get hold of something going. You’d have to buy it. Let’s see, you have four hundred a year from that money that came to you. That’s capital and mind you don’t touch it, but you’ve got something more coming to you, and this is the way of it.”

Now Mr. Flynn’s long and well spent life as a tradesman had been devoted to many pursuits and ambitions, and not the least the ambition, often achieved, to best the government. All healthy Irishmen have a common enemy, the government, but really the old gentleman’s enmity in this respect almost verged on the unhealthy.

It was not the amount saved from the claws of the excise men that mattered so much as the saving of the amount and ten shillings saved from the ‘Income Tax devils’ was equivalent to pounds. But, only recently a new set of devils had arisen to disturb his mind, the Death Duty devils.

Twinges of gout, gout itself armed with a corkscrew not a twinge, Byrne’s words about his ‘going off like a bullet’ and, to cap all, Mrs. Tierney’s lamentations relative to Mr. Tierney’s estate had conspired to a decision now to be announced.

Including the small brewery he had swindled, or shall we say wangled, years ago out of Willy Mullins of Mulligar he was worth some thirty thousand pounds. The idea was to hand over five thousand to his son by deed of gift and so save, at least that, from the burning.

“But I don’t want you to do any such thing,” said the son when the little scheme was unfolded to him. “I don’t want to make or save money out of your death.”

“No, but I do,” said the old gentleman, “and it’s me own death, isn’t it, and I’ve got the right to do what I like with it, unless you want me to cut you off with a shilling and leave all the property to St. Patrick’s Hospital; as it is you’ll have the most of it when I’m gone, bar an annuity to your Aunt Mary and a thousand to the Rotunda Hospital and five hundred to Father Melligan for the ragged schools—so what are you talking about?”

So that was that, and next morning the transfer having been made, Flynn found himself the richer by five thousand pounds in his hand and the knowledge that the bulk of the property would come to him at the old man’s death. A knowledge that gave him no pleasure.

What worried him most at the moment about the transaction was a suspicion that the benefactor had an idea in his mind that his son, being endowed like this, might return to Ireland and set up a big practice in Merrion Square. He had hinted more than once in the past as to the desirability of the attempt, but he stipulated nothing.

All the same, after lunch that day and, playing in his mind with the idea, Flynn went for a walk through the city including the Merrion Square district. It chilled him.

A book dealing with the ailments of young children should cover the fact that very young children can’t explain themselves. The doctor’s business is, as I think I have said before, akin to that of the vet. whose patients are dumb animals.

However, scarcely had Flynn left the house on his journey to Ireland than Mr. Patrick Ginnis made an attempt to do the impossible in the way of explanations with regard to the condition of his interior, in a manner in no way suggesting dumbness.

“The doctor hadn’t scarce put his foot outside the house,” explained Biddy to Cherry, “than he starts his game, kickin’ the blanket off him and raisin’ the roof, and me with me hands full cleanin’ the kitchen and polishin’ the furniture before he gets back; I’d sooner he’d livelled a gun at me seein’ the way I’m placed with all that work on me shoulders and not knowing what to do.”

“Well, it’s not your fault,” said Cherry, who had inspected the patient, now lying quiescent and seeming for the moment indifferent to the trouble he had failed to explain.

“It’s not your fault, and maybe, whatever it is, it has passed off; all the same, though I don’t know much about children, I don’t care for the look of him. Dr. Cheadle is away, I believe, but if there’s any more trouble I’ll send for Dr. Travers who looks after his work.”

The suggestion that a telegram should be sent to Flynn was vetoed by him. The unfortunate man had been in need of a holiday for a long time past and his holiday wasn’t going to be spoiled by a panic wire, not if Cherry could help it. It is good sometimes to have a common sense friend like Cherry.

All the same, the good doctor had underestimated the gravity of the case. As Dr. Travers said, some little time later, “You never know where you are with children.”

Flynn, arriving back at Euston by the morning mail from Holyhead, gathered his traps together and, leaving the carriage, joined the crowd making for the exit.

Half asleep and a bit shaken up by the journey, he felt, all the same, glad to be back in London.

To tell the truth Dublin had left no very bright impression on him; for one thing, he no longer belonged there; despite Mr. Mooney, the car driver, and one or two more he had found himself forgotten; also Dublin in its then unwashed state was a bit gloomy; whatever might be said about Harley Street it was well groomed, its door plates shone, and its reputation as the medical centre of the most prosperous city in the world sat well upon it. It was the top of the tree.

And there was the pleasant feeling that, rightly or wrongly, his own reputation was now connected with the street—anyhow as far as the Dublin people were concerned.

“Did you hear about Flynn? Faith they’re saying he’s making pots of money in London, driving about in his carriage attending dukes and duchesses.”

That was the sort of talk, amongst inconsiderable people, maybe, based on idle rumour, maybe, but not unpleasant to the imagination.

Yes, he was glad to be back in London, London that, whatever else it might be holding for him in the way of good or bad luck, held for him at this moment the surprise of his life, for at the ticket barrier among the few people waiting for arriving friends, he found Mrs. Wentworth.

Greater love hath no man than this, that he gets out of his warm bed at an early hour and drives to Euston Station to break bad news to a friend.

Few men would do it, but Mrs. Wentworth was not a man.

They spoke little during the drive to Harley Street. There are subjects that don’t make for conversation. Even Biddy recognized this as she led him to the room and left him with Pat.

It was Timotheus, all over again, and there was nothing to be said or thought or done about it.

The Wentworths had a fine mausoleum in Kensal Green. It was part of the house property left by Wentworth to his wife, it had a beautiful wrought iron door and marble pillars and had cost hundreds of pounds. He had expressed the wish that she should reside there with him after she had given up the house in Cambridge Terrace and she didn’t mind; she had that sort of feeling, which is the best feeling to have as regards bodily death—absolute indifference.

If he had wished her to be buried in the dog’s cemetery, already mentioned, and if the authorities had been willing she would not have minded—preferred it maybe, but would not have minded.

This marble house of hers occurred to her now in conversation with Cherry. Pat, like Timotheus, was destined it seemed to sleep for ever in high, if alien company, and, later, in conversation with Flynn, the matter was arranged and later in conversation between Biddy and James ratified, in a way of speaking.

Said Biddy, referring to her master and the interest that was being taken in him and his affairs: “The Lord never made a good heart and a simple man to be set adrift in this wicked old world without sendin’ an angel to look after him; that’s what Father Bryan tould us at the buryin’ of old Tom Toft who’d been near battered to death by two wives before a third one saved him, but not in time to cheat the undertakers; and he said ‘Get angels in pictures out of your heads; it’s not wings that make angels but kind thoughts and words,’ says he, ‘and now go home all of you and think of what I’ve tould you,’ says he, ‘and remember Mr. Toft.’ ”

James received this ecclesiastical pronouncement without comment; they were in the kitchen just before he went off home for the night and Biddy, despite everything was doing a bit of ironing.

“My sister,” said he, “told me she knew a woman which got a kid that went off something like this one; someone had given it something to eat that stuck in its innards or something, but she said that wouldn’t have done it any harm if it had been healthy.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Mahony, “there’s some you may belt on the head with a crowbar and they’re none the worse, and there’s others you may blow out like a candle with a puff of wind, and all I can say is, Lord save us from having childer to look after.”

Next day was lovely and warm for the season. One of those days that come to London; raising without answering the question, Why do they come? What are they doing in Drury Lane and the New Cut, Endell Street, Harley Street, Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn, Park Lane?

One does not ask the same question about Kensal Green. All days are the same there—pretty much.

Still, it pleased Mrs. Wentworth that to-day was fine, if only for the sake of her friend and the bit of his heart he was leaving behind him here—a tiny bit, maybe, but, all the same, a bit.

She took him along back to tea in Cambridge Terrace and they had a long talk about things in general, and he told about his visit to Dublin and how his father had wanted him to come over and start in Merrion Square and about the five thousand made over to him. “But to tell the truth,” said he, “I’ve had enough of cities and rich people and their ways; only this morning before we started I had a letter from old Forsyth complaining that I hadn’t been to see him. Wednesday is the day I see him. I suppose I ought to have told him I was going to Ireland, but I forgot and it isn’t what he said in his letter but the tone of it that hit me, and it coming this morning on top of this worry; and there’s not only that, I seem always putting my foot in it, somehow, I got wrong with a specialist that’s attending Huskisson without meaning any offence to him—but there you are.” He went on telling about the Shawls and Murgatroyds and the rest of them and the patient woman listened to him. Then she said: “Do you mind my saying what is in my mind? Well, I think you ought never to have come to Harley Street, I don’t think you are fitted by temperament to deal with these sort of people. Goodness knows I’m not a Socialist, I think the poor have just as bad ways as the rich, but they are simpler ways; rich and poor are all human beings; but the poor are more human, anyhow less artificial. I’m sure I don’t know,” she went on, “what all this talk of success is about; it seems to me that the only success in the world worth having is happiness; one must have a certain amount of money and, if possible, be healthy—after that if one is not happy it is one’s own fault. And, of course, a man must have something to do, it’s the same with a woman. No,” she said, looking at him as if looking beyond him, “I don’t see you ever being happy where you are; I felt that a long time ago and you remember I took you down that day to Rookhurst, for it was in my mind to show you what an old-fashioned, simple, country practice is; where a man can find work and a man can do good and find nature around him, not bricks and mortar. I believe the practice is to be sold, and I want you to think about it.”

Flynn was silent for a moment, then he said:

“I don’t know I’m sure, I don’t know why it should be or why you should trouble about a person like myself, but for a long time past you’ve been better than a friend to me—trying to help me to get on and all the time helping me by just the knowing that you were there.”

When he got home he found James waiting for him—or, at least, in the hall—with a letter that had come by hand evidently for it was not stamped. A mean-looking letter addressed in a woman’s hand and giving his full style and title as printed on his visiting card. He had once received an anonymous letter looking exactly like this thing which he opened saying to himself, “What now?”

The envelope contained a sheet of paper and also a postal order for five shillings, and on the paper was written:

No name.

He had almost forgotten the omnibus incident; all but forgotten the pale face of the woman he had helped out of a nasty position; the woman who had remembered.

“When did this come?” he asked.

James said it had come about an hour ago, given in by a female who had asked to see Flynn.

“Looked like one of the begging letter writing people,” said James, “so I didn’t ask her to wait.”

Letter from Mrs. Shawl to her friend, Miss Amelia Prentice, written on thin old-fashioned paper and crossed after the fashion still lingering in the Edwardian days:—

Dear Reader,—that was all over forty years ago, yet Harley Street houses look just the same to-day and Kensal Green just the same; though its tenants are more numerous. Forty years is a long time.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

[The end of Harley Street by H. de Vere Stacpoole]