bring us together again in order
to prevent her own secret from being exposed.

At some moments she seemed the perfection of honesty and integrity,
without the slightest affectation of interest or artificiality of
manner, and it was this fresh complexity of her character that utterly
baffled me. I could not determine whether, or not, she was in earnest.

"If it is really destiny I suppose that to try and resist it is quite
futile," I remarked mechanically.

"Absolutely. Ethelwynn will become your wife, and you have all my good
wishes for prosperity and happiness."

I thanked her, but pointed out that the matrimonial project was, as
yet, immature.

"How foolish you are, Ralph!" she said. "You know very well that you'd
marry her to-morrow if you could."

"Ah! if I could," I repeated wistfully. "Unfortunately my position is
not yet sufficiently well assured to justify my marrying. Wedded
poverty is never a pleasing prospect."

"But you have the world before you. I've heard Sir Bernard say so,
times without number. He believes implicitly in you as a man who will
rise to the head of your profession."

I laughed dubiously, shaking my head.

"I only hope that his anticipations may be realized," I said. "But I
fear I'm no more brilliant than a hundred other men in the hospitals.
It takes a smart man nowadays to boom himself into notoriety. As in
literature and law, so in the medical profession, it isn't the clever
man who rises to the top of the tree. More often it is a second-rate
man, who has private influence, and has gauged the exact worth of
self-advertisement. This is an age of reputations quickly made, and
just as rapidly lost. In the professional world a new man rises with
every moon."

"But that need not be so in your case," she pointed out. "With Sir
Bernard as your chief, you are surely in an assured position."

Taking her into my confidence, I told her of my ideal of a snug
country practice--one of those in which the assistant does the
night-work and attends to the club people, while there is a circle of
county people as patients. There are hundreds of such practices in
England, where a doctor, although scarcely known outside his own
district, is in a position which Harley Street, with all its turmoil
of fashionable fads and fancies, envies as the elysium of what life
should be. The village doctor of Little Perkington may be an ignorant
old buffer; but his life, with its three days' hunting a week, it