ve you any other instructions to give?"

"Well, I might give the conventional advice--to maintain a cheerful
outlook and avoid worry; but I don't suppose you would find it very
helpful."

"No," she answered bitterly; "it is a counsel of perfection. People in
our position are not a very cheerful class, I am afraid; but still they
don't seek out worries from sheer perverseness. The worries come
unsought. But, of course, you can't enter into that."

"I can't give any practical help, I fear, though I do sincerely hope
that your father's affairs will straighten themselves out soon."

She thanked me for my good wishes and accompanied me down to the street
door, where, with a bow and a rather stiff handshake, she gave me my
_conge_.

Very ungratefully the noise of Fetter Lane smote on my ears as I came
out through the archway, and very squalid and unrestful the little
street looked when contrasted with the dignity and monastic quiet of the
old garden. As to the surgery, with its oilcloth floor and walls made
hideous with gaudy insurance show-cards in sham gilt frames, its aspect
was so revolting that I flew to the day-book for distraction, and was
still busily entering the morning's visits when the bottle-boy,
Adolphus, entered stealthily to announce lunch.

CHAPTER III

JOHN THORNDYKE

That the character of an individual tends to be reflected in his dress
is a fact familiar to the least observant. That the observation is
equally applicable to aggregates of men is less familiar, but equally
true. Do not the members of the fighting professions, even to this day,
deck themselves in feathers, in gaudy colours and gilded ornaments,
after the manner of the African war-chief or the "Redskin brave," and
thereby indicate the place of war in modern civilisation? Does not the
Church of Rome send her priests to the altar in habiliments that were
fashionable before the fall of the Roman Empire, in token of her
immovable conservatism? And, lastly, does not the Law, lumbering on in
the wake of progress, symbolise its subjection to precedent by head-gear
reminiscent of the days of good Queen Anne?

I should apologise for obtruding upon the reader these somewhat trite
reflections; which were set going by the quaint stock-in-trade of the
wig-maker's shop in the cloisters of the Inner Temple, whither I had
strayed on a sultry afternoon in quest of shade and quiet. I had halted
opposite the little shop window, and, with my eye