within, though he dissembled. For was he not a fine fellow ? When Wilmot recognized it heaven was about him.

"Yes, Tony," she said, "we'll have her, and I'll try to help her every way I can."

She was thinking inwardly that the hardest part-the chatter-it would be hers to bear.

Sitting over the fire in her own sitting-room that night, Wilmot laughed to herself at the thought of the doctor's excitement. She held one of the current reviews that were sometimes sent across to them by Captain Penrice. Challacombe always seemed like the Dark Ages by the side of the wider atmosphere of these messages from the outer world: pictures, books, plays, exciting new scientific theories; what did Challacombe care for such things-Challacombe, to whom art was represented by a painting of a fat sheep, with the weight of its limbs, when killed, fastened below? Worst of all, Tony was contented to sink into an intellectual donothing, who did not even glance into the medical papers he received, and who agitated himself over-Johanna. Yet here a suspicion, an idea of a possible pettiness in herself, struck her, and with the notion came the idea that it was her duty to cultivate Tony. She tip-toed across the hall in order to peep into the consulting-room, for he ought to be working at his Rabelais paper, or at least reading Lucretius.

She stood, herself unheard, watching from the doorway; he sat bending down across his writing-table, and she noticed that the bald patches were certainly widening. Then she suddenly turned away and fled upstairs—she was laughing and panting a little. As she closed her door, she said, "After all, he's rather a dear, for all he's so humdrum." As she moved about, touching the ornaments in her room, she hummed a song, for it was her own photograph at which she had caught him looking so intently.

Nevertheless, the next morning the maid hammered long

K

at the doctor's door, for the room below was full of parish patients, and a woman waited two hours for a death certificate. Wilmot was speechless with indignation. But Johanna took up her abode at Dashpers, and that week Miss Penaluna amazed Susan by ordering the ironing-board to be prepared on a Friday. Now the week's ironing was over by Thursday at latest, and Susan's faculty of wonder was much exercised. Late into the night, with furtive secrecy, as if committing a crime, Miss Dorothy starched and ironed and goffered tiny frocks and under-garments, all rather yellow with lying by, yet dainty. A few days later Johanna's little Elizabeth left. off her shell of ragged shawls: there was a fine robe among Miss Penaluna's treasures, and the baby wore it at its christening, where Dr. Borlace promised and vowed on its behalf with great cordiality. It was all to him, of course, only a quaint survival of superstition, but to Johanna it meant another pull up the rocky pathway to a cleaner life, and to give her that Dr. Tony would cheerfully have sacrificed to Ra or Osiris, or any power that happened to be in fashion.

CHAPTER XIV

HONEY FROM THE ROCK

TO-NIGHT it was freezing out at sea, and even in sheltered Challacombe the wind moaned against the close-shut windows. On a January night like this Diogenes found a warmer resting-place than the window-seat, for he slept on Dr. Borlace's knee in front of the consulting-room fire. It was one of the doctor's rare nights of leisure, and content radiated from him, marred only by the fact that Wilmot had not appeared to give him his tea. Still, he had frustrated her in the matter of slippers after all. That morning he had found her in the act of destroying a pair-old, worn, and hideous, but beloved. Snatching them from their funeral pile, he had enjoyed a triumph all day.

At last the door opened with a rush of fresh air and the scent of violets. It was Wilmot with a nosegay at her breast.

"I'm so sorry, Tony," she said, flinging aside her outdoor garments, "that I wasn't in to give you your tea, but I've been having a gossip with Mrs. Coad, all about you."

She stood curling rings of hair on her fingers in front of the mirror. It was the old one that the doctor had cracked, now with a new glass.

Dr. Tony merely grunted.

"Tony, I'm sorry for what I said this morning, but I never know things, somehow."

"What did you say?" he asked, between puffs of his pipe. He remembered perfectly, but expected enjoyment from her apologies, and so made the most of them.

"Why, that you never did anything," she said, kneeling down by him excitedly; "and now I hear that you have induced them to pay for a district nurse, and it will be splendid for the poor people. You know you never told me a word about it, and now everybody is singing your praises."

They solemnly shook hands, for the doctor now never attempted uninvited caresses. Hidden in the background of the thoughts of both there was the question of the new water supply, which ere many days had elapsed would be a settled matter; but about this the strictest silence reigned between them, for both dreaded speech that might reveal even more visibly the gulf between creatures so closely linked by outward lot. Meanwhile, Dr. Borlace tried to live according to the Stoic motto, "The only point that matters is that we do our duty." It must be confessed, too, that he did it, not altogether without gleams of joy in the heroic limelight that his wife so rejoiced to turn on the bare drama of the humdrum.

"I'll do more than bring in a district nurse," he said, concealing his pleasure under a scowl of determination.

"Tony, do you know they call you the man in a hurry?" said Wilmot, beginning to laugh as she crouched on the rug by his side. "I heard all about Mrs. Perrett's baby from Ann Coad."

Dr. Tony recognized the affair to which she referred, and blushed, being as modest as Uncle Toby. Mrs. Perrett's baby taking an unconscionable time in starting on its earthly career, the doctor wished to expedite matters, being a man of humanity, but Mrs. Coad stood in his way literally.

"You don't go up these stairs with that black bag," she said, "not without you go over my body, young man." Mrs. Coad's body being mountainous, Dr. Borlace yielded.

"Mrs. Coad is a most shocking female, Wilmot," said he. "I really wonder at you."

"So she is," laughed Wilmot; "but you're a tenderhearted old thing all the same, Tony."

The doctor felt like a god with the sweet savour of the worshippers' incense in his nostrils.

"Supper," ordered he, standing up to stretch. "I've just poured a wine-glass of port into the Stilton. It's just ripe too. The world's still worth living in when one can get Stilton."

However, Wilmot showed but little appreciation of the drunken Stilton. She was evidently preoccupied, after her fit of elation. After supper Lucretius came out, but her mind seemed far away from the work.

"Just listen to this," she said, reading from the wellworn copy in front of her—

"Scilicet in tenero tenerascere corpore mentem

Confugient. Quod si iam fit, fateare necessest
Mortalem esse animam. . . .'

"Of a truth, they will have recourse to the idea that the mind gathers weakness from the weak body it inhabits. But if that is so, it must be confessed that the soul is mortal." She read and translated slowly, as if the simple words brought far-reaching thoughts. "Is that what you believe too," she said suddenly-"soul and body both to decay together? Very simple too. Tony," she continued, pushing away the small table covered with papers at which she sat, "I'll read no more Lucretius just now; not till after the next few months, anyway."

"Why?" The doctor was one of the human gadflies who affect that monosyllable.

"Is that what you believe too," she repeated, answering him indirectly, "that life is but a blind struggle of atoms and the end but darkness? Tony, is my child a mere concurrence of atoms?"