Doctor Wybrow rose from his chair, determined to close the interview.

He was strongly and painfully impressed by what he had heard.  The longer he had listened to her, the more irresistibly the conviction of the woman’s wickedness had forced itself on him.  He tried vainly to think of her as a person to be pitied—­a person with a morbidly sensitive imagination, conscious of the capacities for evil which lie dormant in us all, and striving earnestly to open her heart to the counter-influence of her own better nature; the effort was beyond him.  A perverse instinct in him said, as if in words, Beware how you believe in her!

‘I have already given you my opinion,’ he said.  ’There is no sign of your intellect being deranged, or being likely to be deranged, that medical science can discover—­as I understand it.  As for the impressions you have confided to me, I can only say that yours is a case (as I venture to think) for spiritual rather than for medical advice.  Of one thing be assured:  what you have said to me in this room shall not pass out of it.  Your confession is safe in my keeping.’

She heard him, with a certain dogged resignation, to the end.

‘Is that all?’ she asked.

‘That is all,’ he answered.

She put a little paper packet of money on the table. 
‘Thank you, sir.  There is your fee.’

With those words she rose.  Her wild black eyes looked upward, with an expression of despair so defiant and so horrible in its silent agony that the Doctor turned away his head, unable to endure the sight of it.  The bare idea of taking anything from her—­not money only, but anything even that she had touched—­suddenly revolted him.  Still without looking at her, he said, ’Take it back; I don’t want my fee.’

She neither heeded nor heard him.  Still looking upward, she said slowly to herself, ’Let the end come.  I have done with the struggle:  I submit.’

She drew her veil over her face, bowed to the Doctor, and left the room.

He rang the bell, and followed her into the hall.  As the servant closed the door on her, a sudden impulse of curiosity—­ utterly unworthy of him, and at the same time utterly irresistible—­ sprang up in the Doctor’s mind.  Blushing like a boy, he said to the servant, ‘Follow her home, and find out her name.’  For one moment the man looked at his master, doubting if his own ears had not deceived him.  Doctor Wybrow looked back at him in silence.  The submissive servant knew what that silence meant—­he took his hat and hurried into the street.

The Doctor went back to the consulting-room.  A sudden revulsion of feeling swept over his mind.  Had the woman left an infection of wickedness in the house, and had he caught it?  What devil had possessed him to degrade himself in the eyes of his own servant?  He had behaved infamously—­he had asked an honest man, a man who had served him faithfully for years, to turn spy!  Stung by the bare thought of it, he ran out into the hall again, and opened the door.  The servant had disappeared; it was too late to call him back.  But one refuge from his contempt for himself was now open to him—­ the refuge of work.  He got into his carriage and went his rounds among his patients.