nice time of day for a lad of twenty to be hanging about the
house!"_)

But all he said was:

"I am the doctor. I called to see Miss Mary."

"Oh!" Even this new butler assumed a look of burdened intelligence; he
leaned toward the visitor, "Oh, yes, sir--Miss Mary. I understood that
it wouldn't be possible for Miss Mary to see anybody, sir, but I
suppose, the doctor----"

"Certainly," said Stanchon curtly. "Please send word to her nurse that
I am here."

"Yes, sir," but the man hesitated, even as he took the hat held out to
him, "yes, sir, but--but ... it isn't Dr. Jarvyse, is it, sir?"

A slow, dark red spread over Stanchon's forehead.

(_"So they've sent for Jarvyse--well, I might have known. Nice,
tactful crowd, aren't they!"_)

He scowled slightly and set his jaw.

"No, I'm Dr. Stanchon," he said. "Dr. Jarvyse is coming later, I
suppose. Kindly let Miss Jessop know that I am here, will you? I
haven't much time."

The man sped swiftly down the hall, after depositing his hatless charge
in a blue satin reception-room, and Stanchon stared, unseeing, at the
old Chinese panels and ivory figures that dotted its walls and tables.
The strong odour of freesias and paper-narcissus hung heavy in the
room; the roar of the great, dirty, cold city was utterly shut away and
a scented silence, costly and blue and drowsy, held everything.

Presently the nurse stood before him, smiling, and he saw that her
usual modish house dress was changed for the regulation white duck and
peaked cap of her profession.

"What's all this?" he asked, and she shrugged her broad shoulders.

"She told me to put it on to-day. 'You're really a nurse, you know,
Miss Jessop,' she said, 'and if I require one, it might as well be
known.' Of course, I had it here, so I got it right out. Poor Miss
Mary!"

"I see they've sent for Jarvyse?"

She nodded uncomfortably.

"Then it's all over but the shouting, I suppose?" Again she shrugged.
The fatalism of her training spoke in that shrug, and the necessity for
taking everything as it comes--since everything is bound to come!

"H'm..." he meditated deeply, and all the youth went out of his face,
suddenly: he might have been forty-five or fifty. At such times the
nurses and the other doctors always watched him eagerly; it was
supposed that it was then that those uncanny intuitions came to him,
that almost clairvoyant penetration of the diseased minds that were his
chosen study.

"