that drooped a little, and round brown eyes that were extremely
pretty and wore a perpetual expression of surprise. She was rather anaemic,
preferred croquet to lawn-tennis--then the rage--and kept a journal, after
the style of an American model. But the space which Mary McMullins cribbed
from Mary McMullins to devote to a description of the bathroom in which
the ablutions of her family were performed, and a vivid word-picture of
their tooth-brushes ranged in a row, and their recently wrung-out garments
in the act of taking the air upon the back-garden clothes-line, was all
devoted to Mildred in Mildred's journal. In it Owen found a place. He was
described as a blend between "Rochester" in "Jane Eyre" and "Bazarov" in
Turgenev's "Fathers and Children." In one specially high-flown passage he
was referred to as a grim granite rock, to which the delicate
clematis-like nature of Mildred, clinging, was to envelop it with leaf and
blossom. She read him the passage one day. Their faces were very close
together as they sat upon the sofa in the pretty Pont Street drawing-room,
and his newly-bought engagement-ring gleamed on her long white hand....
The remembrance of that day made the Dop Doctor laugh out harshly in the
midst of his anguish. So trivial and so weak a thing had been that love of
hers on which he had founded the castle of his hopes and desires.

Now the aspiring young man bought a practice with some thousands advanced
by his father out of the younger son's portion that should be his one day.
It lay just where Hyde Park merges into Paddington. Here a medical man may
feel the pulse of Dives for gold, and look at the tongue of Lazarus for
nothing, and supply medicine into the bargain, if he be of kindly soul,
and this hopeful, rising surgeon and physician had an open hand and an
unsuspecting nature.

God! how much the worse for him. The sweat-drops ran down into the Dop
Doctor's eyes as he remembered that.

He set up his bachelor tent in Chilworth Street, furnishing the rooms he
meant to inhabit with a certain sober luxury. By-and-by the house could be
made pretty, unless Mildred should insist upon his moving to Wigmore
Street, or to Harley Street, that Mecca of the ambitious young
practitioner. Probably Mildred's people would insist upon Harley Street.
They were wealthy; their daughter would be quite an heiress, "another
instance of Owen's luck," as David, long ago gazetted to a crack Cavalry
regiment, would say, and