Without it, he would have been useless in this case of need.  The philosopher could starve with equanimity, and be the stronger.  But one had, it seemed here clearly, to put on harness and trudge along a line, if the unhappy were to have one’s help.  Gradual experiences of his business among his fellows were teaching an exercised mind to learn in regions where minds unexercised were doctorial giants beside it.

The study of gout was offered at Chinningfold.  Admiral Fakenham’s butler refused at first to take a name to his master.  Gower persisted, stating the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was induced to consult Mrs. Carthew.

She sprang up alarmed.  After having seen the young lady happily married and off with her lordly young husband, the arrival of a messenger from the bride gave a stir the wrong way to her flowing recollections; the scenes and incidents she had smothered under her love of the comfortable stood forth appallingly.  The messenger, the butler said, was no gentleman.  She inspected Gower and heard him speak.  An anomaly had come to the house; for he had the language of a gentleman, the appearance of a nondescript; he looked indifferent, he spoke sympathetically; and he was frank as soon as the butler was out of hearing.  In return for the compliment, she invited him to her sitting-room.  The story of the young countess, whom she had seen driven away by her husband from the church in a coach and four, as being now destitute, praying to see her friends, in the Whitechapel of London—­the noted haunt of thieves and outcasts, bankrupts and the abandoned; set her asking for the first time, who was the man with dreadful countenance inside the coach?  A previously disregarded horror of a man.  She went trembling to the admiral, though his health was delicate, his temper excitable.  It was, she considered, an occasion for braving the doctor’s interdict.

Gower was presently summoned to the chamber where Admiral Fakenham reclined on cushions in an edifice of an arm-chair.  He told a plain tale.  Its effect was to straighten the admiral’s back, and enlarge in grey glass a pair of sea-blue eyes.  And, ‘What’s that?  Whitechapel?’ the admiral exclaimed,—­at high pitch, far above his understanding.  The particulars were repeated, whereupon the sick-room shook with, ‘Greengrocer?’ He stunned himself with another of the monstrous points in his pet girl’s honeymoon:  ‘A prizefight?’

To refresh a saving incredulity, he took a closer view of the messenger.  Gower’s habiliments were those of the ‘queer fish,’ the admiral saw.  But the meeting at Carlsruhe was recalled to him, and there was a worthy effort to remember it.  ‘Prize-fight!—­Greengrocer!  Whitechapel!’ he rang the changes rather more moderately; till, swelling and purpling, he cried:  ‘Where’s the husband?’

That was the emissary’s question likewise.