s, family connections, and so forth, as fully and as
minutely as you please. Has he any friends connected with China, for
instance?"

"China? Why, no, I think not; except--but I'll tell you all I know. Mr.
Mason has no family connections, so far as I am aware--at any rate, in
London--except his niece, Miss Creswick. She is within a few months of
twenty-one, a charming girl, but horribly shut in, for Mason has almost
no visitors. Miss Creswick was his sister's daughter; she lost her
mother first and then her father, and was left to the guardianship of
her uncle. He was also trustee under the will, and he has, I believe,
discretion to keep charge of her property, if he thinks fit, till she
reaches the age of twenty-five; though in case of his death she is to
inherit in the ordinary way, on coming of age. She is a very dutiful
and, indeed, an affectionate niece; though I must say he is scarcely
fair to her, keeping her, as he does, so completely secluded from the
society of young people of her own age. Mere thoughtlessness, I think;
he has had no children of his own, his mind is wholly occupied with his
science and his fads, and he makes himself a recluse without a thought
of the girl. And that brings me to what I was about to say at first,
when you asked me if Mr. Mason had any friends connected with China.
There is a young doctor--Lawson is his name--some very distant
connection of the family, I think, who had a professional appointment of
some sort in Shanghai for a year or two, but who is now in London trying
to work up a small practice of his own. If you hadn't mentioned China I
shouldn't have thought of him, since he never goes to the house now--or,
at any rate, is supposed not to go."

"Doesn't go to the house? And why is that?"

"Well, there was a disagreement. What it was I don't quite know, but in
the first place it had some connection with some of Mason's
experiments--something which Lawson declined to help him with for
professional reasons, or else something he declined to do for Lawson, I
don't know which. But the thing went further, for, as a matter of fact,
there was something between the young people--Lawson is only
twenty-eight--and Mason put an end to that. It had been something like a
formal engagement, I think, but in the quarrel--Mason was always
quarrelling with somebody when he _had_ friends, and that's why he has
so few now--in the quarrel things were said that ended in a rupture.
Whether young L