e, and I saw a mysterious expression in them. There is
always something strange in the eyes of a pretty woman who is hiding a
secret.

"Well, Doctor," she answered, in a voice quite calm and deliberate,
"you've already shown yourself so openly as being disinclined to
further associate yourself publicly with poor Ethelwynn, because of
the tragedy that befell the household, that you surely cannot complain
if you find your place usurped by a new and more devoted lover."

"What!" I cried, starting up, fiercely. "What is this you tell me?
Ethelwynn has a lover?"

"I have nothing whatever to do with her affairs, Doctor," said the
tantalising woman, who affected all the foibles of the smarter set.
"Now that you have forsaken her she is, of course, entirely mistress
of her own actions."

"But I haven't forsaken her!" I blurted forth.

She only smiled superciliously, with the same mysterious look--an
expression that I cannot define, but by which I knew that she had told
me the crushing truth. Ethelwynn, believing that I had cast her aside,
had allowed herself to be loved by another!

Who was the man who had usurped my place? I deserved it all, without a
doubt. You, reader, have already in your heart condemned me as being
hard and indifferent towards the woman I once loved so truly and so
well. But, in extenuation, I would ask you to recollect how grave were
the suspicions against her--how every fact seemed to prove
conclusively that her sister's husband had died by her hand.

I saw plainly in Mrs. Henniker's veiled words a statement of the
truth; and, after obtaining from her Ethelwynn's address near
Hereford, bade her farewell and blindly left the house.

CHAPTER XX.

MY NEW PATIENT.

In the feverish restlessness of the London night, with its rumbling
market-wagons and the constant tinkling of cab-bells, so different to
the calm, moonlit stillness of the previous night in rural England, I
wrote a long explanatory letter to my love.

I admitted that I had wronged her by my apparent coldness and
indifference, but sought to excuse myself on the ground of the
pressure of work upon me. She knew well that I was not a rich man, and
in that slavery to which I was now tied I had an object--the object I
had placed before her in the dawning days of our affection--namely,
the snug country practice with an old-fashioned comfortable house in
one of the quiet villages or smaller towns in the Midlands. In those
days she