st of repute.

This was an aged Spanish Jew, unclean and cadaverous, with patriarchal
grey beard and piercing eyes, a man renowned for his marvellous cures
among the peasantry.

He was regarded more or less as a wizard, though his wizardry consisted
solely in a knowledge of natural remedies, and the exercise of a power
which would have been described at the Paris Salpetriere as hypnotic
suggestion. By the aid of this he was able to inspire his patients
with the faith so necessary to a successful treatment.

Michael was not fettered in any way by the ordinary conventions of a
practitioner. He had neither drugs nor instruments of his own
wherewith to effect a cure on ordinary lines, and what he had seen of
herbalists in Spain had inspired him with a vast respect for the
simplicity and success of their methods. The wooden box contained a
quantity of leaves which, steeped in scalding water, and applied to the
patient's throat, possessed the power of reducing the inflammation and
drawing out the poison through the pores of the skin. Of their
efficacy Michael entertained not the slightest doubt.

He walked straight to the bed, and glanced at Arithelli's throat, now
almost covered with white patches of membrane. There was no time to
waste if she was to be saved from the ghastliness of slow suffocation.

He went to the head of the stairs and yelled lustily for Maria, whom he
commanded to produce boiling water immediately, thus further adding to
the reputation of the mad English for haste and unreasonableness.

Then he took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and began busily to
clear a space on the table, on which he emptied the contents of the box.

All his movements had suddenly become alert and energetic. The joy of
the true physician, the healer, had awakened in him at the prospect of
a duel with Death, and he was no longer merely the slouching,
good-natured wastrel who doctored horses at the Hippodrome.

He possessed for the moment the dignity of a leader, of the master of a
situation. He smiled to himself as he moved about humming a verse of
"Let Ireland remember," and swept away a _debris_ of books, a rouge
pot, some dead flowers, and a large over-trimmed hat.

"Shure 'tis back in the surgery again I am," he told himself, while his
lean, ugly face beamed with satisfaction.

No one who knew Michael Furness had ever suspected the regret by which
he was for ever haunted, regret at the loss of his professio