As they approached it, they were startled by a sudden noise of strife.  The next instant the door of the surgery, which was a small building connected with the house by a passage, flew open, and a young man was shot out.  He half jumped, half fell down the six or eight steps, turned at once, and ran up again.  He had rather a refined look, notwithstanding the annoyance and resentment that discomposed his features.  The mat had caught the door and he was just in time to prevent it from being shut in his face.

“I will not submit to such treatment, Mr. Faber,” cried the youth.  “It is not the part of a gentleman to forget that another is one.”

“To the devil with your gentleman!” they heard the doctor shout in a rage, from behind the half-closed door.  “The less said about the gentleman the better, when the man is nowhere!”

“Mr. Faber, I will allow no man to insult me,” said the youth, and made a fierce attempt to push the door open.

“You are a wretch below insult,” returned the doctor; and the next moment the youth staggered again down the steps, this time to fall, in awkward and ignominious fashion, half on the pavement, half in the road.

Then out on the top of the steps came Paul Faber, white with wrath, too full of indignation to see person or thing except the object of it.

“You damned rascal!” he cried.  “If you set foot on my premises again, it will be at the risk of your contemptible life.”

“Come, come, Mr. Faber! this won’t do,” returned the youth, defiantly, as he gathered himself up.  “I don’t want to make a row, but—­

“You don’t want to make a row, you puppy!  Then I do.  You don’t come into my house again.  I’ll have your traps turned out to you.—­Jenkins!—­You had better leave the town as fast as you can, too, for this won’t be a secret.”

“You’ll allow me to call on Mr. Crispin first?”

“Do.  Tell him the truth, and see whether he’ll take the thing up!  If I were God, I’d damn you!”

“Big words from you, Faber!” said the youth with a sneer, struggling hard to keep the advantage he had in temper.  “Every body knows you don’t believe there is any God.”

“Then there ought to be, so long as such as you ’ain’t got your deserts. You set up for a doctor!  I would sooner lose all the practice I ever made than send you to visit woman or child, you heartless miscreant!”

The epithet the doctor really used here was stronger and more contemptuous, but it is better to take the liberty of substituting this.

“What have I done then to let loose all this Billingsgate?” cried the young man indignantly.  “I have done nothing the most distinguished in the profession haven’t done twenty times over.”

“I don’t care a damn.  What’s the profession to humanity!  For a wonder the public is in the right on this question, and I side with the public.  The profession may go to—­Turkey!”—­Probably Turkey was not the place he had intended to specify, but at the moment he caught sight of Juliet and her companion.—­“There!” he concluded, pointing to the door behind him, “you go in and put your things up—­and be off.”