anxious young students
in hospital; or to nurses, too excitedly conscious at first of the fact
that he was talking to them, to take in fully what he was saying. His
habit of giving people, even in final moments, the full time they
wanted, had once lost him an overcoat, almost lost him a train, and won
him the thing in life he most desired. But that belongs to another
story.

Meanwhile he wanted his breakfast on this fresh spring morning. And he
wanted to see Jane. Therefore, as porter and portmanteau made no
advance towards him, the doctor strode down the platform.

"Now then, my man!" he called.

"I beg your pardon?" said the Scotch porter.

"I want my portmanteau."

"Would this be your portmanteau?" inquired the porter doubtfully.

"It would," said the doctor. "And it and I would be on our way to
Castle Gleneesh, if you would be bringing it out and putting it into
the motor, which I see waiting outside."

"I will be fetching a truck," said the porter. But when he returned,
carefully trundling it behind him, the doctor, the portmanteau, and the
motor were all out of sight.

The porter shaded his eyes and gazed up the road.

"I will be hoping it WAS his portmanteau," he said, and went back to
his porridge.

Meanwhile the doctor sped up into the hills, his mind alight with
eagerness to meet Jane and to learn the developments of the last few
days. Her non-appearance at the railway station filled him with an
undefinable anxiety. It would have been so like Jane to have been
there, prompt to seize the chance of a talk with him alone before he
reached the house. He had called up, in anticipation, such a vivid
picture of her, waiting on the platform,--bright, alert, vigorous, with
that fresh and healthy vigour which betokens a good night's rest, a
pleasant early awakening, and a cold tub recently enjoyed,--and the
disappointment of not seeing her had wrought in him a strange
foreboding. What if her nerve had given way under the strain?

They turned a bend in the winding road, and the grey turrets of
Gleneesh came in sight, high up on the other side of the glen, the moor
stretching away behind and above it. As they wound up the valley to the
moorland road which would bring them round to the house, the doctor
could see, in the clear morning light, the broad lawn and terrace of
Gleneesh, with its gay flower-beds, smooth gravelled walks, and broad
stone parapet, from which was a drop almost sheer down into the glen