ope
very much, sir, you won't let me lose it."

The doctor looked down from his goodly height upon the stooping
shoulders of the suppliant. "I've got my duty to Clomayne's to perform,
you know," he said. "They send their clerks abroad into all sorts of
climates--very unhealthy, some of them. Climates where you, my poor
fellow, could not live a month."

"I could take my chance," Peter said quickly. "I'm not afraid, sir. I
shouldn't ask any favour. If I died, it would make no difference to
Clomayne's. I mean the inconvenience would be mine."

"My dear fellow, you're a phthisical subject--not to mince matters. You
told me your family history----"

"You asked me, sir," Peter interrupted, with a note of reproach in his
softly thick voice.

"It was my duty to ask. Your father died a year ago of pneumonia, your
mother ten years ago in a decline. Do you ask me to conceal these facts
from Clomayne's?--to say that I consider you in strong health? Then,
you ask what is absolutely impossible. I am sorry, but it is
impossible. I think that is all I have to say on the subject, and--my
time is very short."

"I am going almost at once, sir," Peter said, speaking with an effort
of cheerfulness, but with a load of sorrow and disappointment lying, a
physical weight, upon his heart. "I came because Cicely thought if I
told you 'twas a matter of life and death, sir--. It is that to me,
almost--it is. I'm very good at shorthand--hundred and twenty a minute;
my arithmetic and book-keeping, too, are more than fair. My
hand-writing's good, I might say. My hands don't always shake like
this----"

"My dear boy," the doctor said, with an impatience at once angry and
pitiful, "all that has less than nothing to do with me!"

"But if you'd give me a chance, sir!" His eyes were extraordinarily
bright and pleading, his slight frame shook with eagerness; he made as
though he swallowed something with difficulty. "After all, I shall have
to cringe," he said to himself. "Since my father died, I have had to
depend on my uncle, sir," he went on. "I owe everything to him. He's
very good--but there are a lot of his own children; and there's my
aunt--and she thinks--. My uncle doesn't grudge me anything, he often
says so, but he naturally wants me to be getting my own living--and so
does my aunt; and she doesn't quite understand how difficult it is,
nowadays, to get in to anything--and my cousins don't understand it
either, except Cicely, she's diffe