se of ordinary trance, that could easily wait till you
came, as usual, to-morrow."

"Ah, well," said Lefevre, "let me see him."

Seen thus, the physician appeared a different person from the cheerful,
modest man of the Hyacinth Club. He had now put on the responsibility of
men's health and the enthusiasm of his profession. He seemed to swell in
proportions and dignity, though his eye still beamed with a calm and
kindly light.

The young man led the way down the echoing flagged passage, and up the
flight of stone stairs. As they went they encountered many silent female
figures, clean and white, going up or down (it was the time of changing
nurses), so that a fanciful stranger might well have thought of the
stairway reaching from earth to heaven, on which the angels of God were
seen ascending and descending. A stranger, too, would have noted the
peculiar odours that hung about the stairs and passages, as if the
ghosts of medicines escaped from the chemist's bottles were hovering in
the air. Opening first an outer and then an inner door, Lefevre and his
companion entered a large and lofty ward. The room was dark, save for
the light of the fire and of a shaded lamp, by which, within a screen,
the night-nurse sat conning her list of night-duties. The evening was
just beginning out of doors,--shop-fronts were flaring, taverns were
becoming noisy, and brilliantly-lit theatres and music-halls were
settling down to business,--but here night and darkness had set in more
than an hour before. Indeed, in these beds of languishing, which
stretched away down either side of the ward, night was hardly to be
distinguished from day, save for the sunlight and the occasional
excitement of the doctor's visit; and many there were who cried to
themselves in the morning, "Would God it were evening!" and in the
evening, "Would God it were morning!" But there was yet this other
difference, that disease and doctor, fear and hope, gossip and
grumbling, newspaper and Bible and tract, were all forgotten in the
night, for some time at least, and Nature's kind restorer, sleep, went
softly round among the beds and soothed the weary spirits into peace.

Lefevre and the house-physician passed silently up the ward between the
rows of silent blue-quilted beds, while the nurse came silently to meet
them with her lamp. Lefevre turned aside a moment to look at a man whose
breathing was laboured and stertorous. The shaded light was turned upon
him: an opiat