He nodded in a more or less embarrassed manner, and turning away from me, went rather slowly down the saloon stairs.

I gave a sigh of relief when he was gone.  I had from the first moment of our meeting recognised in him a mental organisation which in its godless materialism and indifference to consequences, was opposed to every healthful influence that might be brought to bear on his patients for their well-being, whatever his pretensions to medical skill might be.  It was to his advantage to show them the worst side of a disease in order to accentuate his own cleverness in dealing with it,—­it served his purpose to pamper their darkest imaginings, play with their whims and humour their caprices,—­I saw all this and understood it.  And I was glad that so far as I might be concerned, I had the power to master him.

V

AN UNEXPECTED MEETING

To spend a few days on board a yacht with the same companions is a very good test of the value of sympathetic vibration in human associations.  I found it so.  I might as well have been quite alone on the ‘Diana’ as with Morton Harland and his daughter, though they were always uniformly kind to me and thoughtful of my comfort.  But between us there was ‘a great gulf fixed,’ though every now and again Catherine Harland made feeble and pathetic efforts to cross that gulf and reach me where I stood on the other side.  But her strength was not equal to the task,—­her will-power was sapped at its root, and every day she allowed herself to become more and more pliantly the prey of Dr. Brayle, who, with a subconscious feeling that I knew him to be a mere medical charlatan, had naturally warned her against me as an imaginative theorist without any foundation of belief in my own theories.  I therefore shut myself within a fortress of reserve, and declined to discuss any point of either religion or science with those for whom the one was a farce and the other mere materialism.  At all times when we were together I kept the conversation deliberately down to commonplaces which were safe, if dull,—­and it amused me not a little to see that at this course of action on my part Mr. Harland was first surprised, then disappointed and finally bored.  And I was glad.  That I should bore him as much as he bored me was the happy consummation of my immediate desires.  I talked as all conventional women talk, of the weather, of our minimum and maximum speed, of the newspaper ‘sensations’ and vulgarities that were served up to us whenever we called at a port for the mails,—­of the fish that frequented such and such waters, of sport, of this and that millionaire whose highland castle or shooting-box was crammed with the ‘elite’ whose delight is to kill innocent birds and animals,—­of the latest fool-flyers in aeroplanes,—­in short, no fashionable jabberer of social inanities could have beaten me in what average persons call ’common-sense