Was it really idleness he longed for?  He did not know why, but abruptly his desire had changed.  And he found himself wishing for events, tragic, tremendous, horrible even—­anything, if they were unusual, were such as to set the man who was involved in them apart from his fellows.  The foreign element in him woke up, called, perhaps, from repose by the unusually languid air, and London seemed meaningless to him, a city where a man of his type could neither dream, nor act, with all the languor, or all the energy, that was within him.  And he imagined, as sometimes clever children do, a distant country where all romances unwind their shining coils, where he would find the incentive which he needed to call all his secret powers—­the powers whose exercise would make his life complete—­into supreme activity.

He gripped his horse with his knees.  It understood his desire.  It broke into a canter.  He passed in front of the garden of Stafford House, turned to the left past St. James’s Palace and Marlborough House, and was soon at his own door.

“Please bring up the book with my coffee in twenty minutes, Henry,” he said to his servant, as he went in.

In half an hour he was seated in an arm-chair in an upstairs sitting-room, sipping his coffee.  The papers lay folded at his elbow.  Upon his knee, open, lay the book in which were written down the names of the patients with whom he had made appointments that day.

He looked at them, seeking for one that promised interest.  The first patient was a man who would come in on his way to the city.  Then followed the names of three women, then the name of a boy.  He was coming with his mother, a lady of an anxious mind.  The Doctor had a sheaf of letters from her.  And so the morning’s task was over.  He turned a page and came to the afternoon.

“Two o’clock, Mrs. Lesueur; two-thirty, Miss Mendish; three, the Dean of Greystone; three-thirty, Lady Carle; four, Madame de Lys; four-thirty, Mrs. Harringby; five, Sir Henry Grebe; five-thirty, Mrs. Chepstow.”

The last name was that of the last patient.  Doctor Meyer Isaacson’s day’s work was over at six, or was supposed to be over.  Often, however, he gave a patient more than the fixed half-hour, and so prolonged his labours.  But no one was admitted to his house for consultation after the patient whose name was against the time of five-thirty.

And so Mrs. Chepstow would be the last patient he would see that day.

He sat for a moment with the book open on his knee, looking at her name.

It was a name very well known to him, very well known to the English-speaking world in general.