ion of the doctor)
he even tried the locked door of the laboratory, and waited and
listened! It was a breezy summer-day; the leaves of the trees near him
rustled cheerfully. Was there another sound audible? Yes--low and faint,
there rose through the sweet woodland melody a moaning cry. It paused;
it was repeated; it stopped. He looked round him, not quite sure whether
the sound proceeded from the outside or the inside of the building. He
shook the door. Nothing happened. The suffering creature (if it was
a suffering creature) was silent or dead. Had chemical experiment
accidentally injured some living thing? Or--?

He recoiled from pursuing that second inquiry. The laboratory had,
by this time, become an object of horror to him. He returned to the
dwelling-house.

He put his hand on the latch of the gate, and looked back at the
laboratory. He hesitated.

That moaning cry, so piteous and so short-lived, haunted his ears. The
idea of approaching Benjulia became repellent to him. What he might
afterwards think of himself--what his mother and Carmina might think
of him--if he returned without having entered the doctors' house, were
considerations which had no influence over his mind, in its present
mood. The impulse of the moment was the one power that swayed him. He
put the latch back in the socket. "I won't go in," he said to himself.

It was too late. As he turned from the house a manservant appeared
at the door--crossed the enclosure--and threw the gate open for Ovid,
without uttering a word.

They entered the passage. The speechless manservant opened a door on the
right, and made a bow, inviting the visitor to enter. Ovid found himself
in a room as barren as the field outside. There were the plastered
walls, there was the bare floor, left exactly as the builders had
left them when the house was finished. After a short absence, the man
appeared again. He might be depressed in spirits, or crabbed in temper:
the fact remained that, even now, he had nothing to say. He opened
a door on the opposite side of the passage--made another bow--and
vanished.

"Don't come near me!" cried Benjulia, the moment Ovid showed himself.

The doctor was seated in an inner corner of the room; robed in a long
black dressing-gown, buttoned round his throat, which hid every part
of him below his fleshless face, except his big hands, and his tortured
gouty foot. Rage and pain glared in his gloomy gray eyes, and shook
his clenched fists,