Losing his father and mother at an early age, and brought up till he was fourteen by Mr. Stone, he had formed the habit of thinking for himself.  This had rendered him unpopular, and added force to the essential single-heartedness transmitted to him through his grandfather.  A particular aversion to the sights and scenes of suffering, which had caused him as a child to object to killing flies, and to watching rabbits caught in traps, had been regulated by his training as a doctor.  His fleshly horror of pain and ugliness was now disciplined, his spiritual dislike of them forced into a philosophy.  The peculiar chaos surrounding all young men who live in large towns and think at all, had made him gradually reject all abstract speculation; but a certain fire of aspiration coming, we may suppose, through Mr. Stone, had nevertheless impelled him to embrace something with all his might.  He had therefore embraced health.  And living, as he did, in the Euston Road, to be in touch with things, he had every need of the health which he embraced.

Late in the afternoon of the day when Hughs had committed his assault, having three hours of respite from his hospital, Martin dipped his face and head into cold water, rubbed them with a corrugated towel, put on a hard bowler hat, took a thick stick in his hand, and went by Underground to Kensington.

With his usual cool, high-handed air he entered his aunt’s house, and asked for Thyme.  Faithful to his definite, if somewhat crude theory, that Stephen and Cecilia and all their sort were amateurs, he never inquired for them, though not unfrequently he would, while waiting, stroll into Cecilia’s drawing-room, and let his sarcastic glance sweep over the pretty things she had collected, or, lounging in some luxurious chair, cross his long legs, and fix his eyes on the ceiling.

Thyme soon came down.  She wore a blouse of some blue stuff bought by Cecilia for the relief of people in the Balkan States, a skirt of purplish tweed woven by Irish gentlewomen in distress, and held in her hand an open envelope addressed in Cecilia’s writing to Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace.

“Hallo!” she said.

Martin answered by a look that took her in from head to foot.

“Get on a hat!  I haven’t got much time.  That blue thing’s new.”

“It’s pure flax.  Mother bought it.”

“It’s rather decent.  Hurry up!”

Thyme raised her chin; that lazy movement showed her round, creamy neck in all its beauty.

“I feel rather slack,” she said; “besides, I must get back to dinner, Martin.”

“Dinner!”

Thyme turned quickly to the door.  “Oh, well, I’ll come,” and ran upstairs.

When they had purchased a postal order for ten shillings, placed it in the envelope addressed to Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace, and passed the hundred doors of Messrs. Rose and Thorn, Martin said:  “I’m going to see what that precious amateur has done about the baby.  If he hasn’t moved the girl, I expect to find things in a pretty mess.”