stood in Bridgetown.  It may have been no more than the fortune of war.  But the townsfolk did not choose so to regard it.  It led to a further dwindling of the practices of his free colleagues and a further increase of his own labours and his owner’s profit.  Whacker and Bronson laid their heads together to devise a scheme by which this intolerable state of things should be brought to an end.  But that is to anticipate.

One day, whether by accident or design, Peter Blood came striding down the wharf a full half-hour earlier than usual, and so met Miss Bishop just issuing from the shed.  He doffed his hat and stood aside to give her passage.  She took it, chin in the air, and eyes which disdained to look anywhere where the sight of him was possible.

“Miss Arabella,” said he, on a coaxing, pleading note.

She grew conscious of his presence, and looked him over with an air that was faintly, mockingly searching.

“La!” said she.  “It’s the delicate-minded gentleman!”

Peter groaned.  “Am I so hopelessly beyond forgiveness?  I ask it very humbly.”

“What condescension!”

“It is cruel to mock me,” said he, and adopted mock-humility.  “After all, I am but a slave.  And you might be ill one of these days.”

“What, then?”

“It would be humiliating to send for me if you treat me like an enemy.”

“You are not the only doctor in Bridgetown.”

“But I am the least dangerous.”

She grew suddenly suspicious of him, aware that he was permitting himself to rally her, and in a measure she had already yielded to it.  She stiffened, and looked him over again.

“You make too free, I think,” she rebuked him.

“A doctor’s privilege.”

“I am not your patient.  Please to remember it in future.”  And on that, unquestionably angry, she departed.

“Now is she a vixen or am I a fool, or is it both?” he asked the blue vault of heaven, and then went into the shed.

It was to be a morning of excitements.  As he was leaving an hour or so later, Whacker, the younger of the other two physicians, joined him — an unprecedented condescension this, for hitherto neither of them had addressed him beyond an occasional and surly “good-day!”

“If you are for Colonel Bishop’s, I’ll walk with you a little way, Doctor Blood,” said he.  He was a short, broad man of five-and-forty with pendulous cheeks and hard blue eyes.

Peter Blood was startled.  But he dissembled it.

“I am for Government House,” said he.

“Ah!  To be sure!  The Governor’s lady.”  And he laughed; or perhaps he sneered.  Peter Blood was not quite certain.  “She encroaches a deal upon your time, I hear.  Youth and good looks, Doctor Blood!  Youth and good looks!  They are inestimable advantages in our profession as in others — particularly where the ladies are concerned.”