all Charing in the shop looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if Carling’s picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green shade over her forehead.  Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders of applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind of a prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she ’ll try it herself.  It’s a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent’s Park pretty well every day.’

‘Ha!  Regent’s Park!’ exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the district and the number of the house, dismal to him.  London buried the woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London.  ’A chemist’s shop!  She sits there?’

‘Mrs. Burman.  We pass by the shop.’

’She had always a turn for drugs.—­Not far from here, did you say?  And every day! under a green shade?’

‘Dear fellow, don’t be suggesting ballads; we’ll go now,’ said Fenellan.  ’It ‘s true it’s like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.’

He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the office.

‘You’ve done nothing?’ Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.

‘Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.’

‘Where did you hear?’

’Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady’s chemists.  I called the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board Meeting.’

‘The Themison?’

’The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much in request for it.’

‘There’s one of your echoes of Colney!’ Victor cried.  ’One gets dead sick of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors.  They don’t kill, you know very well.  It ’s not to their interest to kill.  They may take the relish out of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the patient living!’

Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through his friend.

’The City’s mending; it’s not the weary widow woman of the day when we capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,’ he said, as they trod the pavement.  ’Funny people, the English!  They give you all the primeing possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for the exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not, you’re marched off to penitence.  I complain, that they have no philosophical appreciation of human nature.’

‘We pass the shop?’ Victor interrupted him.

’You’re in view of it in a minute.  And what a square, for recreative dancing!  And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political agitation!  And what a country, where from morning to night it’s an endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence!  Old Colney seems right now and then:  they ’re the offspring of pirates, and they ’ve got the manners and tastes