he man, he must endure him!

"There is nothing the matter with me," said he languidly.

"I should be the best judge of that, after what Mrs. Vavasour has just
told me," said Tom, in his most professional and civil voice; and
slipped, catlike, into a seat beside the unresisting poet.

He asked question on question: but Elsley gave such unsatisfactory
answers, that Lucia had to detail everything afresh for him,
with--"You know, Mr. Thurnall, he is always overtasking his brain, and
will never confess himself ill,"--and all a woman's anxious comments.

Rogue Tom knew all the while well enough what was the cause: but he
saw, too, that Elsley was very ill. He felt that he must have the
matter out at once; and, by a side glance, sent the obedient Lucia out
of the room to get a table-spoonful of brandy.

"Now, my dear sir, that we are alone," began he blandly.

"Now, sir!" answered Vavasour, springing off the sofa, his whole
pent-up wrath exploding in hissing steam, the moment the safety-valve
was lifted. "Now, sir! What--what is the meaning of this insolence,
this intrusion?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Vavasour," answered Tom, rising, in a tone of
bland and stolid surprise.

"What do you want here, with your mummery and medicine, when you know
the cause of my malady well enough already? Go, sir! and leave me to
myself."

"My dear sir," said Tom firmly, "you seem to have forgotten what
passed between us this morning."

"Will you insult me beyond endurance?" cried Elsley.

"I told you that, as long as you chose, you were Elsley Vavasour, and
I the country doctor. We have met in that character. Why not sustain
it? You are really ill; and if I know the cause, I am all the more
likely to know the cure."

"Cure?"

"Why not? Believe me, it is in your power to become a much happier
man, simply by becoming a healthier one."

"Impertinence!"

"Pish! What can I gain by being impertinent, sir? I know very well
that you have received a severe shock; but I know equally well, that
if you were as you ought to be, you would not feel it in this way.
When one sees a man in the state of prostration in which, you are,
common sense tells one that the body must have been neglected, for the
mind to gain such power over it."

Elsley replied with a grunt; but Tom went on, bland and imperturbable.

"Believe me, it may be a very materialist view of things: but fact
is fact--the _corpus sanum_ is father to the _mens sana_--tonics and