ng catastrophe and the
end of all things. Oh, dear! Miss Quincey wished he would come up if he
was coming, and get it over.

After all he did not keep her waiting long, and it was over in five
minutes. And yet it was amazing the amount of observation, and insight,
and solid concentrated thought the young man contrived to pack into those
five minutes.

Well--it seemed that it was not general paralysis this time, nor yet
anemia of the brain; but he could tell her more about it in the morning.
Meanwhile she had nothing to do but to do what he told her and stay where
she was till he saw her again. And he was gone before she realized that
he had been there.

Again? So he was coming again, was he? Miss Quincey did not know whether
to be glad or sorry. His presence had given her a rare and curiously
agreeable sense of protection, but she had to think of the expense. She
had to think too of what Mrs. Moon would say to it--of what she would say
to him.

Mrs. Moon had a good deal to say to it. She took Juliana's illness as a
personal affront, as a deliberate back-handed blow struck at the memory
of Tollington Moon. With all the base implications of her daily acts,
Juliana had never attempted anything like this.

"Capers and nonsense," she said, "Juliana has never had an illness in her
life."

She said it to Rhoda Vivian, the bold young person who had taken upon
herself to bring the doctor into the house. Mrs. Moon spoke of the doctor
as if he was a disease.

Fortunately Miss Vivian was by when he endured the first terrifying
encounter. Her manner suggested that she took him under her protection,
stood between him and some unfathomable hostility.

He found the Old Lady disentangling herself with immense dignity from her
maze of furniture. Mrs. Moon was a small woman shrunk with her eighty
years, shrunk almost to extinction in her black woollen gown and black
woollen mittens. Her very face seemed to be vanishing under the immense
shadow of her black net cap. Spirals of thin grey hair stuck flat to her
forehead; she wore other and similar spirals enclosed behind glass in an
enormous brooch; it was the hair of her ancestors, that is to say of the
Quinceys. As the Old Lady looked at Cautley her little black eyes burned
like pinpoints pierced in a paste-board mask.

"I think you've been brought here on a wild goose chase, doctor," said
she, "there is nothing the matter with my niece."

He replied (battling sternly with his