lamp for night work near the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at night, a silver biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely intent industry of the small hours.  There was a bookcase of bluebooks, books of reference and suchlike material, and some files.  Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged photograph of Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar.  The desk was littered with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty retreat to bed.  And lying among the proofs, as though it had been taken out and looked at quite recently was the photograph of a girl.  For a moment Dr. Martineau’s mind hung in doubt and then he knew it for the young American of Stonehenge.  How that affair had ended he did not know.  And now it was not his business to know.

These various observations printed themselves on Dr. Martineau’s mind after his first cursory examination of his patient and while he cast about for anything that would give this large industrious apartment a little more of the restfulness and comfort of a sick room.  “I must get in a night nurse at once,” he said.  “We must find a small table somewhere to put near the bed.

“I am afraid you are very ill,” he said, returning to the bedside.  “This is not, as you say, my sort of work.  Will you let me call in another man, a man we can trust thoroughly, to consult?”

“I’m in your hands, said Sir Richmond.  I want to pull through.”

“He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for the case—­and everything.”

The second doctor presently came, with the right sort of nurse hard on his heels.  Sir Richmond submitted almost silently to his expert handling and was sounded and looked to and listened at.

“H’m,” said the second doctor, and then encouragingly to Sir Richmond:  “We’ve got to take care of you.

“There’s a lot about this I don’t like,” said the second doctor and drew Dr. Martineau by the arm towards the study.  For a moment or so Sir Richmond listened to the low murmur of their voices, but he did not feel very deeply interested in what they were saying.  He began to think what a decent chap Dr. Martineau was, how helpful and fine and forgiving his professional training had made him, how completely he had ignored the smothered incivilities of their parting at Salisbury.  All men ought to have some such training, Not a bad idea to put every boy and girl through a year or so of hospital service....  Sir Richmond must have dozed, for his next perception was of Dr. Martineau standing over him and saying “I am afraid, my dear Hardy, that you are very ill indeed.  Much more so than I thought you were at first.”

Sir Richmond’s raised eyebrows conveyed that he accepted this fact.

“I think Lady Hardy ought to be sent for.”

Sir Richmond shook his head with unexpected vigour.

“Don’t want her about,” he said, and after a pause, “Don’t want anybody about.”