“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 desire to laugh) that he would be delighted if it were so; adding that a wild goose chase was the sport he preferred to any other.

Here he looked at Miss Vivian to the imminent peril of his self-control.  Mrs. Moon’s gaze had embraced them in a common condemnation, and the subtle sympathy of their youth linked them closer and made them one in their intimate appreciation of her.

“Then you must be a very singular young man.  I thought you doctors were never happy until you’d found some mare’s nest in people’s constitutions?  You’d much better let well alone.”

“Miss Quincey is very far from well,” said Cautley with recovered gravity, “and I rather fancy she has been let alone too long.”

Cautley thought that he had said quite enough to alarm any old lady.  And indeed Mrs. Moon was slowly taking in the idea of disaster, and it sent her poor wits wandering in the past.  Her voice sank suddenly from grating; antagonism to pensive garrulity.

“I’ve no faith in medicine,” she quavered, “nor in medical men either.  Though to be sure my husband had a brother-in-law once on his wife’s side, Dr. Quincey, Dr. Arnold Quincey, Juliana’s father and Louisa’s.  He was a medical man.  He wrote a book, I daresay you’ve heard of it; Quincey on Diseases of the Heart it was.  But he’s dead now, of one of ’em, poor man.  We haven’t seen a doctor for five-and-twenty years.”

“Then isn’t it almost time that you should see one now?” said he, cheerfully taking his leave.  “I shall look round again in the morning.”

He looked round again in the morning and sat half an hour with Miss Quincey; so she had time to take a good look at him.

He was very nice to look at, this young man.  He was so clean-cut and tall and muscular; he had such an intellectual forehead; his mouth was so firm, you could trust it to tell no secrets; and his eyes (they were dark and deep set) looked as if they saw nothing but Miss Quincey.  Indeed, at the moment he had forgotten all about Rhoda Vivian, and did see nothing but the little figure in the bed looking more like a rather worn and wizened child than a middle-aged woman.  He was very gentle and sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible to her.  As it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever doctor, who in spite of his cleverness looked so young, and not only so young but so formidably fastidious and refined.  She had not expected him to look like that.  All the clever young men she had met had displayed a noble contempt for appearances.  To be sure, Miss Quincey knew but little of the world of men; for at St. Sidwell’s the types were limited to three little eccentric professors, and the plaster gods in the art studio.  But for the gods she might just as well have lived in a nunnery,