t, and by choice--a doctor. That a man of independent
means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who
could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility
of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help
themselves, puzzled them. After that, it irritated them, and, greatly to
his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices.

Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither
consulting-room, book-keeper, nor professional manner. He took no fees,
being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no
harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted
unremunerative cases, and cases that interested him for some very
special reason. He argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor
could avail themselves of organized charity, but that a very large class
of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the arts, could
not afford the price of a week's comforts merely to be told to travel.
And it was these he desired to help; cases often requiring special and
patient study--things no doctor can give for a guinea, and that no one
would dream of expecting him to give.

But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with
which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially
appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible,
elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions;
and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the
title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally
as the "Psychic Doctor."

In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted
himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and
spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no
one seemed to know,--for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed
no single other characteristic of the charlatan,--but the fact that it
had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and
that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever
dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack,
spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the
genuineness of his attainments.

For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the
"man who knows." There was a trace of pity in his voice--contempt he
never