hich
he could give assurance by the pressure of those lips was truly
wonderful. By his lips, also, he could be most exquisitely courteous,
or most sternly forbidding. And not only could he be either the one
or the other; but he could at his will assume any shade of difference
between the two, and produce any mixture of sentiment.

When Dr Fillgrave was first shown into Sir Roger's dining-room, he
walked up and down the room for a while with easy, jaunty step, with
his hands joined together behind his back, calculating the price
of the furniture, and counting the heads which might be adequately
entertained in a room of such noble proportions; but in seven or
eight minutes an air of impatience might have been seen to suffuse
his face. Why could he not be shown into the sick man's room? What
necessity could there be for keeping him there, as though he were
some apothecary with a box of leeches in his pocket? He then rang
the bell, perhaps a little violently. "Does Sir Roger know that I am
here?" he said to the servant. "I'll tell my lady," said the man,
again vanishing.

For five minutes more he walked up and down, calculating no longer
the value of the furniture, but rather that of his own importance.
He was not wont to be kept waiting in this way; and though Sir Roger
Scatcherd was at present a great and rich man, Dr Fillgrave had
remembered him a very small and a very poor man. He now began to
think of Sir Roger as the stone-mason, and to chafe somewhat more
violently at being so kept by such a man.

When one is impatient, five minutes is as the duration of all time,
and a quarter of an hour is eternity. At the end of twenty minutes
the step of Dr Fillgrave up and down the room had become very quick,
and he had just made up his mind that he would not stay there all
day to the serious detriment, perhaps fatal injury, of his other
expectant patients. His hand was again on the bell, and was about to
be used with vigour, when the door opened and Lady Scatcherd entered.

The door opened and Lady Scatcherd entered; but she did so very
slowly, as though she were afraid to come into her own dining-room.
We must go back a little and see how she had been employed during
those twenty minutes.

"Oh, laws!" Such had been her first exclamation on hearing that the
doctor was in the dining-room. She was standing at the time with her
housekeeper in a small room in which she kept her linen and jam,
and in which, in company with th