When Dr Fillgrave was first shown into Sir Roger’s dining-room, he walked up and down the room for a while with easy, jaunty step, with his hands joined together behind his back, calculating the price of the furniture, and counting the heads which might be adequately entertained in a room of such noble proportions; but in seven or eight minutes an air of impatience might have been seen to suffuse his face.  Why could he not be shown into the sick man’s room?  What necessity could there be for keeping him there, as though he were some apothecary with a box of leeches in his pocket?  He then rang the bell, perhaps a little violently.  ‘Does Sir Roger know that I am here?’ he said to the servant.  ‘I’ll tell my lady,’ said the man, again vanishing.

For five minutes more he walked up and down, calculating no longer the value of the furniture, but rather that of his own importance.  He was not wont to be kept waiting in this way; and though Sir Roger Scatcherd was at present a great and rich man, Dr Fillgrave had remembered him a very small and a very poor man.  He now began to think of Sir Roger as the stone-mason, and to chafe somewhat more violently at being so kept by such a man.

When one is impatient, five minutes is as the duration of all time, and a quarter of an hour is eternity.  At the end of twenty minutes the step of Dr Fillgrave up and down the room had become very quick, and he had just made up his mind that he would not stay there all day to the serious detriment, perhaps fatal injury, of his other expectant patients.  His hand was again on the bell, and was about to be used with vigour, when the door opened and Lady Scatcherd entered.

‘Oh, laws!’ Such had been her first exclamation on hearing that the doctor was in the dining-room.  She was standing at the time with her housekeeper in a small room in which she kept her linen and jam, and in which, in company with the same housekeeper, she spent the happiest moments of her life.

‘Oh laws! now, Hannah, what shall we do?’

’Send ’un up at once to master, my lady! let John take ‘un up.’

‘There’ll be such a row in the house, Hannah; I know there will.’

’But surely didn’t he send for ’un?  Let the master have the row himself, then; that’s what I’d do, my lady,’ added Hannah, seeing that her ladyship still stood trembling in doubt, biting her thumb-nail.

‘You couldn’t go up to the master yourself, could now, Hannah?’ said Lady Scatcherd in her most persuasive tone.

‘Why no,’ said Hannah, after a little deliberation; ’no, I’m afeard I couldn’t.’

‘Then I must just face it myself.’  And up went the wife to tell her lord that the physician for whom he had sent had come to attend his bidding.

In the interview which then took place the baronet had not indeed been violent, but he had been very determined.  Nothing on earth, he said, should induce him to see Dr Fillgrave and offend his dear old friend Dr Thorne.