e features were perfectly chiselled. ("Though she'll be florid
before she's forty.")

Some juicy nectarines finished, she pushed back her chair. "And now,
doctor, will you come and see your patient?"

Mahony followed her down a broad, bare passage. A number of rooms
opened off it, but instead of entering one of these she led him out to
a back verandah. Here, before a small door, she listened with bent
head, then turned the handle and went in.

The room was so dark that Mahony could see nothing. Gradually he made
out a figure lying on a stretcher-bed. A watcher sat at the bedside.
The atmosphere was more than close, smelt rank and sour. His first
request was for light and air.

It was the wreck of a fine man that lay there, strapped over the chest,
bound hand and foot to the framework of the bed. The forehead, on which
the hair had receded to a few mean grey wisps, was high and domed, the
features were straight with plenty of bone in them, the shoulders
broad, the arms long. The skin of the face had gone a mahogany brown
from exposure, and a score of deep wrinkles ran out fan-wise from the
corners of the closed lids. Mahony untied the dirty towels that formed
the bandages--they had cut ridges in the limbs they confined--and took
one of the heavy wrists in his hand.

"How long has he lain like this?" he asked, as he returned the arm to
its place.

"How long is it, Saunderson?" asked Mrs. Glendinning. She had sat down
on a chair at the foot of the bed; her skirts overflowed the floor.

The watcher guessed it would be since about the same time yesterday.

"Was he unusually violent on this occasion?--for I presume such attacks
are not uncommon with him," continued Mahony, who had meanwhile made a
superficial examination of the sick man.

"I am sorry to say they are only too common, doctor," replied the
lady.--"Was he worse than usual this time, Saunderson?" she turned
again to the man; at which fresh proof of her want of knowledge Mahony
mentally raised his eyebrows.

"To say trewth, I never see'd the boss so bad before," answered
Saunderson solemnly, grating the palms of the big red hands that hung
down between his knees. "And I've helped him through the jumps more'n
once. It's my opinion it would ha' been a narrow squeak for him this
time, if me and a mate hadn't nipped in and got these bracelets on him.
There he was, ravin' and sweatin' and cursin' his head off, grey as
death. Hell-gate, he called it, said he