“Dear me, how dull you are!” she said to us.  “Why don’t you amuse a poor prisoner confined to the house?  Rest a little, Matilda, or you will be falling ill next.  Doctor! is this your last professional visit?”

“Promise to take care of yourself, Mrs. Eyrecourt, and I will confess that the professional visits are over.  I come here to-day only as a friend.”

“You best of men!  Do me another favor.  Enliven our dullness.  Tell us some interesting story about a patient.  These great doctors, Sir John, pass their lives in a perfect atmosphere of romance.  Dr. Wybrow’s consulting-room is like your confessional, Father Benwell.  The most fascinating sins and sorrows are poured into his ears.  What is the last romance in real life, doctor, that has asked you to treat it medically?  We don’t want names and places—­we are good children; we only want a story.”

Dr. Wybrow looked at me with a smile.

“It is impossible to persuade ladies,” he said, “that we, too, are father-confessors in our way.  The first duty of a doctor, Mrs. Eyrecourt—­”

“Is to cure people, of course,” she interposed in her smartest manner.

The doctor answered seriously.  “No, indeed.  That is only the second duty.  Our first duty is invariably to respect the confidence of our patients.  However,” he resumed in his easier tone, “I happen to have seen a patient to-day, under circumstances which the rules of professional honor do not forbid me to mention.  I don’t know, Mrs. Eyrecourt, whether you will quite like to be introduced to the scene of the story.  The scene is in a madhouse.”

Mrs. Eyrecourt burst out with a coquettish little scream, and shook her fan at the doctor.  “No horrors!” she cried.  “The bare idea of a madhouse distracts me with terror.  Oh, fie, fie!  I won’t listen to you—­I won’t look at you—­I positively refuse to be frightened out of my wits.  Matilda! wheel me away to the furthest end of the room.  My vivid imagination, Father Benwell, is my rock ahead in life.  I declare I can smell the odious madhouse.  Go straight to the window, Matilda; I want to bury my nose among the flowers.”

Sir John, upon this, spoke for the first time.  His language consisted entirely of beginnings of sentences, mutely completed by a smile.  “Upon my word, you know.  Eh, Doctor Wybrow?  A man of your experience.  Horrors in madhouses.  A lady in delicate health.  No, really.  Upon my honor, now, I cannot.  Something funny, oh yes.  But such a subject, oh no.”

He rose to leave us.  Dr. Wybrow gently stopped him.  “I had a motive, Sir John,” he said, “but I won’t trouble you with needless explanations.  There is a person, unknown to me, whom I want to discover.  You are a great deal in society when you are in London.  May I ask if you have ever met with a gentleman named Winterfield?”

I have always considered the power of self-control as one of the strongest points in my character.  For the future I shall be more humble.  When I heard that name, my surprise so completely mastered me that I sat self-betrayed to Dr. Wybrow as the man who could answer his question.