ut with an unimpaired smile on his round face spoke
simultaneously as follows:

"My name is Brown. Pray excuse me. I've come about that business of the
MacNabs. I have heard, you often help people out of such troubles. Pray
excuse me if I am wrong."

By this time he had sprawlingly recovered the hat, and made an odd
little bobbing bow over it, as if setting everything quite right.

"I hardly understand you," replied the scientist, with a cold intensity
of manner. "I fear you have mistaken the chambers. I am Dr Hood, and my
work is almost entirely literary and educational. It is true that I have
sometimes been consulted by the police in cases of peculiar difficulty
and importance, but--"

"Oh, this is of the greatest importance," broke in the little man called
Brown. "Why, her mother won't let them get engaged." And he leaned back
in his chair in radiant rationality.

The brows of Dr Hood were drawn down darkly, but the eyes under them
were bright with something that might be anger or might be amusement.
"And still," he said, "I do not quite understand."

"You see, they want to get married," said the man with the clerical hat.
"Maggie MacNab and young Todhunter want to get married. Now, what can be
more important than that?"

The great Orion Hood's scientific triumphs had deprived him of many
things--some said of his health, others of his God; but they had not
wholly despoiled him of his sense of the absurd. At the last plea of the
ingenuous priest a chuckle broke out of him from inside, and he threw
himself into an arm-chair in an ironical attitude of the consulting
physician.

"Mr Brown," he said gravely, "it is quite fourteen and a half years
since I was personally asked to test a personal problem: then it was
the case of an attempt to poison the French President at a Lord Mayor's
Banquet. It is now, I understand, a question of whether some friend of
yours called Maggie is a suitable fiancee for some friend of hers called
Todhunter. Well, Mr Brown, I am a sportsman. I will take it on. I will
give the MacNab family my best advice, as good as I gave the French
Republic and the King of England--no, better: fourteen years better. I
have nothing else to do this afternoon. Tell me your story."

The little clergyman called Brown thanked him with unquestionable
warmth, but still with a queer kind of simplicity. It was rather as
if he were thanking a stranger in a smoking-room for some trouble in
passing the matches