The world was a good place.  A fine old place.  It had work and play and love.  It had office hours and visits and the golf links, and it had soft feminine eyes and small tender figures to be always cared for and looked after.

She liked him.  She did not think he was old.  She thought his profession was the finest in the world.  She had wondered if he would have time to come and see her, some day.  Time!  He considered very seriously, as he shaved before the slightly distorted mirror in the bathroom, whether it would be too soon to run in that afternoon, just to see if she was tired, or had caught cold or anything?  Perhaps to-morrow would look better.  No, hang it all, to-day was to-day.

On his way from the bathroom to his bedroom he leaned over the staircase.

“Aunt Lucy!” he called.

“Yes, Dick?”

“The top of the morning to you.  D’you think Minnie would have time to press my blue trousers this morning?”

There was the sound of her chair being pushed back in the dining-room, of a colloquy in the kitchen, and Minnie herself appeared below him.

“Just throw them down, Doctor Dick,” she said.  “I’ve got an iron hot now.”

“Some day, Minnie,” he announced, “you will wear a halo and with the angels sing.”

This mood of unreasoning happiness continued all morning.  He went from house to house, properly grave and responsible but with a small song in his heart, and about eleven o’clock he found time to stop at the village haberdasher’s and to select a new tie, which he had wrapped and stuffed in his pocket.  And which, inspected in broad day later on a country road, gave him uneasy qualms as to its brilliance.

At the luncheon table he was almost hilarious, and David played up to him, albeit rather heavily.  But Lucy was thoughtful and quiet.  She had a sense of things somehow closing down on them, of hands reaching out from the past, and clutching; Mrs. Morgan, Beverly Carlysle, Dick in love and possibly going back to Norada.  Unlike David, who was content that one emergency had passed, she looked ahead and saw their common life a series of such chances, with their anxieties and their dangers.

She could not eat.

Nevertheless when she herself admitted a new patient for Dick that afternoon, she had no premonition of trouble.  She sent him into the waiting-room, a tall, robust and youngish man, perhaps in his late thirties, and went quietly on her way to her sitting-room, and to her weekly mending.

On the other hand, Louis Bassett was feeling more or less uncomfortable.  There was an air of peace and quiet respectability about the old house, a domestic odor of baking cake, a quietness and stability that somehow made his errand appear absurd.  To connect it with Judson Clark and his tumultuous past seemed ridiculous.

His errand, on the surface, was a neuralgic headache.