Isaacson was confronted with fluffy indignation.

“You’ll be accusing me of professional incompetence next, I dare say,” continued Doctor Hartley.  “I have not told you before, but I’ll tell you now, that I consider it a breach of the etiquette that governs our profession, your interfering with my patient.”

“How interfering?”

“I hear you gave him something last night—­something to make him sleep.”

“I did.”

“Well, it’s had a very bad effect upon him.”

“Is he worse to-day?”

Isaacson, unknown to himself, said it with an almost fierce emphasis.  Doctor Hartley drew his lips tightly together.

“This is not a consultation,” he said coldly.

“I ask as a friend of the patient’s, not as a doctor.”

“His night was not good.”

He shut his lips tightly again.  His face and his whole smartly-dressed body expressed a rather weak but very lively hostility.

“He’s asleep now,” he added.

“Asleep now?”

“Yes.  He’ll sleep for several hours. I have put him to sleep.”

Isaacson’s body suddenly felt relaxed, as if all the muscles of it were loosened.  For several hours his friend would sleep.  For a moment he enjoyed a sense of fascinating relief.  Then his consciousness of relief, awoke him to another and fuller consciousness of why this relief had come to him, of that which had preceded it, and given it its intensity.

He must take off the gloves.

“Look here, Doctor Hartley,” he said.  “I don’t want to put you out.  I am really not a vulgar, greedy doctor pushing myself into a case with which I have no concern, for some self-interested motive.  I can assure you that I have more than enough to do with illness in London and should be thankful to escape from it here.  I want a holiday.”

“Take one, my dear Doctor Isaacson,” remarked Doctor Hartley, imperturbably—­“take one, and leave me to work.”

“No.  Professional etiquette or no professional etiquette, I can’t take one while my friend is in such a condition of illness.  I can’t do that.”

“I’m really afraid you’ll have to, so far as this case is concerned.  I’m an American, and I’m not going to be pushed away from a thing I’ve set my hand to—­pushed away discourteously, and against the desires of those who have called me in.  Never in the course of my professional experience has another physician butted in—­yes, that’s the expression for it:  butted right in—­without ‘With’ or ‘By your leave,’ as you have.  It’s simply not to be borne.  And I’m not the man to bear what’s not to be borne.  Really, if one didn’t know you to be a doctor, one would almost take you for a Bowery detective.  Straight, now, one would!”

“Where’s Mrs. Armine?” said Isaacson abruptly.  “Is she asleep, too?”

“She is.”

The languid impertinence of the voice goaded Isaacson.  Scarcely ever, if ever, before had he felt such an almost physical longing for violence.  But he did not lose his self-restraint, although he suffered bitterly in keeping it.