‘Greyson!’ and the doctor looked as though a name so medicinally humble had never struck the tympanum of his ear.

’Yes; Greyson.  And then, down at what’s a the man of the place, there was Thorne.’

‘Greshamsbury?’

’Yes; Greshamsbury.  But he and Thorne didn’t hit it off; and so since that he has had no one but myself.’

‘I will be at Boxall Hill in the course of the morning,’ said Dr Fillgrave; ’or, rather, you may say, that I will be there at once:  I will take it in my way.’  And having thus resolved, he gave his orders that the post-horses should make such a detour as would enable him to visit Boxall Hill on his road.  ‘It is impossible,’ said he to himself, ‘that I should be twice treated in such a manner in the same house.’

He was not, however, altogether in a comfortable frame of mind as he was driven up to the hall door.  He could not but remember the smile of triumph with which his enemy had regarded him in that hall; he could not but think how he had returned fee-less to Barchester, and how little he had gained in the medical world by rejecting Lady Scatcherd’s bank-note.  However, he also had had his triumphs since that.  He had smiled scornfully at Dr Thorne when he had seen him in the Greshamsbury street; and had been able to tell, at twenty houses through the county, how Lady Arabella had at last been obliged to place herself in his hands.  And he triumphed again when he found himself really standing by Sir Louis Scatcherd’s bedside.  As for Lady Scatcherd, she did not even show herself.  She kept in her own little room, sending out Hannah to ask him up the stairs; and she only just got a peep at him through the door as she heard the medical creak of his shoes as he again descended.

We need say but little of his visit to Sir Louis.  It mattered nothing now, whether it was Thorne, or Greyson, or Fillgrave.  And Dr Fillgrave knew that it mattered nothing:  he had skill at least for that—­and heart enough also to feel that he would fain have been relieved from this task; would fain have left the patient in the hands even of Dr Thorne.

The name which Joe had given to his master’s illness was certainly not a false one.  He did find Sir Louis ‘in the horrors’.  If any father have a son whose besetting sin was a passion for alcohol, let him take his child to the room of a drunkard when possessed by ‘the horrors’.  Nothing will cure him if not that.

I will not disgust my reader by attempting to describe the poor wretch in his misery:  the sunken, but yet glaring eyes; the emaciated cheeks; the fallen mouth; the parched, sore lips; the face, now dry and hot, and then suddenly clammy with drops of perspiration; the shaking hand, and all but palsied limbs; and worse than this, the fearful mental efforts, and the struggles for drink; struggles to which it is often necessary to give way.

Dr Fillgrave soon knew what was to be the man’s fate; but he did what he might to relieve it.  There, in one big, best bedroom, looking out to the north, lay Sir Louis Scatcherd, dying wretchedly.  There, in the other big, best bedroom, looking out to the south, had died the other baronet about twelvemonth since, and each a victim of the same sin.  To this had come the prosperity of the house of Scatcherd!