dneys. Do you remember
your great-uncle Ebenezer? You've sent down to Miss Myatt, you say?
Good.... Perhaps he was lying on your steps for two or three hours. He
may pull round. He may. We must hope so.'

The doctor put on his overcoat, and his cap with the ear-flaps, and
after a final glance at the patient and a friendly, reassuring smile at
Leonora, he went slowly to the door. Girth and good humour and funny
stories had something to do with his great reputation in Bursley and
Hillport. But he possessed shrewdness and sagacity; he belonged to a
dynasty of doctors; and he was deeply versed in the social traditions of
the district. Men consulted him because their grandfathers had consulted
his father, and because there had always been a Dr. Hawley in Bursley,
and because he was acquainted with the pathological details of their
ancestral history on both sides of the hearth. His patients, indeed,
were not individuals, but families. There were cleverer doctors in the
place, doctors of more refined appearance and manners, doctors less
monotonously and loudly gay; but old Hawley, with his knowledge of
pedigrees and his unique instinctive sympathy with the idiosyncrasies of
local character, could hold his own against the most assertive young
M.D. that ever came out of Edinburgh to monopolise the Five Towns.

'Can you send some one round with me for the medicine?' he asked in the
doorway. 'Happen you'll come yourself, John?'

There was a momentary hesitation.

'I'll come, doctor,' said Rose. 'And then you can give me all your
instructions. Mother must stay here.' She completely ignored her father.

'Do, my dear; come by all means.' And the doctor beamed again suddenly
with the maximum of cheerfulness.

* * * * *

Meshach had given no sign of life; his eyes, staring upwards and
outwards, were still unchangeably fixed on the same portion of the
ceiling. He ignored equally the nonchalant and expert attentions of the
doctor, the false solicitude of John, Leonora's passionate anxiety, and
Rose's calm self-confidence. He treated the fomentations with the apathy
which might have been expected from a man who for fifty years had been
accustomed to receive the meek skilled service of women in august
silence. One could almost have detected in those eyes a glassy and
profound secret amusement at the disturbance which he had caused--a
humorous appreciation of all the fuss: the maids with their hair down