The doctor took the hat of the dead Squire in his hand, and examined it with frowning care.  He put one finger through the hole in the crown and moved it meditatively.  And Paynter realized how fanciful his own fatigue must have made him; for so silly a thing as the black finger waggling through the rent in that frayed white relic unreasonably displeased him.  The doctor soon made the same discovery with professional acuteness, and applied it much further.  For when Paynter began to tell him of the moving water in the well he looked at him a moment through his spectacles, and then said: 

“Did you have any lunch?”

Paynter for the first time realized that he had, as a fact, worked and thought furiously all day without food.

“Please don’t fancy I mean you had too much lunch,” said the medical man, with mournful humor.  “On the contrary, I mean you had too little.  I think you are a bit knocked out, and your nerves exaggerate things.  Anyhow, let me advise you not to do any more to-night.  There’s nothing to be done without ropes or some sort of fishing tackle, if with that; but I think I can get you some of the sort of grappling irons the fishermen use for dragging.  Poor Jake’s got some, I know; I’ll bring them round to you tomorrow morning.  The fact is, I’m staying there for a bit as he’s rather in a state, and I think is better for me to ask for the things and not a stranger.  I am sure you’ll understand.”

Paynter understood sufficiently to assent, and hardly knew why he stood vacantly watching the doctor make his way down the steep road to the shore and the fisher’s cottage.  Then he threw off thoughts he had not examined, or even consciously entertained, and walked slowly and rather heavily back to the Vane Arms.

The doctor, still funereal in manner, though no longer so in costume, appeared punctually under the wooden sign next morning, laden with what he had promised; an apparatus of hooks and a hanging net for hoisting up anything sunk to a reasonable depth.  He was about to proceed on his professional round, and said nothing further to deter the American from proceeding on his own very unprofessional experiment as a detective.  That buoyant amateur had indeed recovered most, if not all, of yesterday’s buoyancy, was now well fitted to pass any medical examination, and returned with all his own energy to the scene of yesterday’s labors.

It may well have brightened and made breezier his second day’s toil that he had not only the sunlight and the bird’s singing in the little wood, to say nothing of a more scientific apparatus to work with, but also human companionship, and that of the most intelligent type.  After leaving the doctor and before leaving the village he had bethought himself of seeking the little court or square where stood the quiet brown house of Andrew Ashe, solicitor, and the operations of dragging were worked in double harness.  Two heads were peering over the well in the wood: